Mobility.
AMD is making significant changes to its mobile Turion chips, too. Dual core Turion 64 X2 chips are now available and feature power management features which AMD (very) boldly claims will shame Intel's Core Duo. That said, unlike Core Duo, mobile Turion chips will be able to power down one core when not required and each core will have its own L2 cache memory. They won't have to share one cache memory chip like Intel.

The DDR2 memory requires lower voltage to further benefit battery life and AMD expects the lower end models to work without cooling fans. Like Core Duo, DDR2-5300 is now supported, though new claims of higher memory bandwidth than Intel due to AMD's architecture have been around for a while. The only way to test which is quicker is to test notebooks as they appear. If AMD can get close to the speed of the Intel-based Dell XPS or battery life of Lenovo's X60 over the course of the next few months, we'll be very impressed.

Also of note is that Mobile Sempron processors will now be 64-bit, and so be able to support 64-bit versions of Windows -- though this will affect few people. Ultimately, AMD hopes the new Turions to produce thinner and lighter notebooks that are faster with better battery life. AMD also hopes to attract popularity from manufacturers by not locking them into chipsets and components like Intel does. This should see more laptops with chipsets from ATI, NVIDIA, SiS and VIA. We'll also see more varied LAN and WLAN chips from the likes of Airgo, Atheros and Broadcom. We'd hope that this competition breeds lower prices.

Title The new AMD Turion X2 Mobile Processors
Model number Frequency L2 cache
TL-60 2GHz 512KB + 512KB
TL-56 1.8GHz 512KB + 512KB
TL-52 1.6GHz 512KB + 512KB
TL-50 1.6GHz 256KB + 256KB

Conclusion
Desktop users may well feel aggrieved that AMD couldn't make the new architecture backwards compatible with Socket 939 and it has to be said that the launch is underwhelming. New features like virtualisation will be a boon to some, but few will notice. It's likely that by the end of the year many of us will be making use of 2GB memory as standard thanks to lower prices.

The laptop market could genuinely be shaken up as, hopefully, the new Turion processors will mean cheaper and faster laptops with better battery lives for all (especially at the lower end of the market). Industry consensus is that notebooks will start to out sell desktops from next year and we expect AMD to seriously improve on its 12 percent market share.