AMD's Turion 64 Mobile Technology is its answer to the success of Intel's Centrino, which is truly a wonder for the modern laptop. Centrino has matured well over the last few years, and is going to be a tough act for Turion to follow. Will it succeed? Well, AMD is not the giant that Intel is, make no mistake; there have been some compromises with Turion it seems. It looks like what we are getting is pretty much just a mobile desktop Athlon 64 platform, but with some interesting features.

AMD doesn't have the resources of Intel, that's plain and simple. They have done an excellent job with their K8 architecture, but for AMD to devote additional resources to developing another architecture, strictly mobile oriented, it's just not possible at this time. At the same time, AMD's Athlon 64 is far more suited for mobile environments than Intel's Pentium 4 ever was, so the need for a mobile specific architecture isn't as great for AMD as it was for Intel. So when AMD announced their Turion 64 "Mobile Technology" we had a feeling it would be something very similar to their desktop Athlon 64s, today AMD confirmed that.

Turion also differs from Centrino, in that with Turion chipsets can be provided by a number of vendors as can the LAN and wireless controllers - nothing is tied exclusively to AMD. Perhaps this will turn out to be strength, who knows? But it does seem clear that there is not that much new here. Or is there? AMD say there is much more:

The firm said that Turion-based laptops will offer similar battery life but better performance than Intel's Centrino technology, and will be the only laptops available this year capable of running the forthcoming 64bit Windows.

However, other reports seem to indicate that Turion is little more than Athlon 64.

With the Turion 64, AMD is doing more of a marketing repackaging of their Athlon 64 than anything else. While it's going to be tough to best Intel's Centrino in overall packaging, the Turion 64 may just be close enough for AMD to be happy. It all boils down to implementation and it'll be tough for Turion to break into the more exotic Centrino markets but it shouldn't have a problem competing in the more mainstream priced Centrino notebooks.