MOBILITY or productivity? It’s interesting to see where Intel and AMD are heading with their new platforms. Intel is scaling down on size and power for its latest mobile architecture dubbed the Atom while AMD is scaling up everything, throwing in all the bells and whistles on its new Puma platform running the latest Turion Ultra.

For the price-conscious, sub-RM2,000 segment which competes head-on with netbooks (an ultra-portable product category) running Atom processors, AMD still maintains its Turion X2 mobile processor offerings. Since mobile processors don’t come in a box, today’s focus consists of the dual-core Turion X2 RM-70 running on chipsets with integrated Nvidia GeForce 9100M-G in the form of the Acer Aspire 4530 notebook computer.

The Turion X2 Dual Core Mobile codenamed Griffin is stepping in with a 65-nanometre process over the previous dual-core Turion X2 Taylor with a 90nm process. While there does not appear to be any performance advantage between the 65nm Griffin core and the older 90nm Taylor core in actual usage, the real advantage shows in terms of energy efficiency.

Compared to the previous Taylor core, the Griffin seems to be aware of its energy consumption, maintaining the same low-core frequency until a real need for power comes in. The 65nm Griffin core easily throttles down to a mere 500 megahertz with a core voltage of only 0.8-volt with a peak of 1.075V running flat-out at two gigahertz.

The Griffin supports beyond four gigabytes (GB) of onboard memory through its x86-64 extensions. This means that if you have a 64-bit operating system and need to use more than 4GB of memory, you can. Additionally, the Turion X2 supports the MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 Intel processor extensions.

While the Aspire 4530 may only have an integrated graphics (which is often associated with being cheap and underpowered), it is bundled with the GeForce 9100M-G, which supports Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), a C-like application programming interface Nvidia had developed to allow programmers to write general-purpose applications that leverage on the power of its GPU. Some programs such as TMPGEnc XPress Video Encoder from Pegasus software provide support for CUDA. This enables the GeForce 9100M-G to run computational-intensive applications through the GPU’s more efficient parallel computing architecture, easing dependency on the CPU. The ForceWare X drivers bundled with the Aspire 4530 are not CUDA-enabled, but users can download and install an “unofficial” ForceWare X version 178.08. Pegasus claims a performance boost of over 400 per cent over the CPU alone.

But the Aspire 4530 loses out to mid-range notebooks, as it neither has fancy aesthetics nor a sleek, slim finish. It also lacks an external PCMCIA or PC Card slot and a fancy Lightscribe labeller/burner. Taking over from the PC Card slot is an ExpressCard/54 slot, plus a DVD-SuperMulti DL reader/recorder, the compulsory three high-speed universal serial bus slots, the typical Secure Digital, xD or Memory Stick Pro/Duo multimedia card slot, an integrated Acer Crystal Eye Webcam, Atheros 802.11b/g wireless connectivity and Bluetooth version 2.0+EDR.

While the processor is the brain behind the notebook, performance does not always depend on the processor alone; it’s the ecosystem – the amount of memory, memory speed, hard drive speed and graphics, integrated or otherwise, etc – that affects the overall system performance.

At a shade below RM2,000, complete with Windows Vista Basic and a nice dark blue lid, it says only one thing: good value for the value-conscious buyer.