Digital Home Thoughts: AMD Offers Laptop Triple Threat

"AMD's offering would be the first triple-core processors available for laptops. AMD has been offering triple-core processors for desktops and offers only dual-core chips for laptops. Intel offers dual-core and quad-core chips for its laptops and desktops."

Upon hearing that AMD wants to give their mobile CPU offerings the triple core treatment, I had to wonder what the benefit would be. I have read a lot of reports showing that triple and quad core systems do not tend to benefit the consumer. However, reading the claims by AMD, their Danube based triple-core mobile goodness will also increase battery life, so I figure, why not? Much like how I believe that NVidia's ION platform is forward thinking in raising the bar for netbooks, the Danube based CPUs should raise the bar on what laptops offer, especially if it increases battery life. To be honest, I would be fine even if it did not help battery life. Advances in how we use computers is still dependant on having more and more horsepower to drive our applications. Sure, this is not quite as relevant as say, when CPUs were still clocked below 1Ghz, but knowing that consumers have plenty of oomph gives developers more options and frees them to use their imagination.