On Wednesday, at a press conference in Taipei city, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveiled the Puma notebook platform, that features the AMD Turion X2 Ultra dual-core ‘Griffin’ mobile processors and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics. According to AMD, the new technology will bring users "the ultimate HD visual performance and increasing energy efficiency."

So far, major laptop producers such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Acer have agreed to use the platform.

In the first half of May, AMD launched five new quad-core Opteron processors (8347 HE, 8346 HE, 2347 HE, 2346 HE, and 2344 HE), described by company officials as energy-efficient. They run on 55 Watts of AC power and, when compared to the 75-watt Barcelona chips that were released by AMD last year, the Opteron shows a 30 percent efficiency increase. The new chips’ speeds, as well as their prices, range from 1.7GHz to 1.9GHz and from $209 to $873, respectively.

Next year, AMD’s first six-core chip is scheduled for release and for the first half of 2010, a 12-core processor is being prepared.

Although things may be looking good right now, they could be much better. At the beginning of April, AMD announced that it would have to make very serious workforce cuts. Until that point, this had only been a rumor but as AMD officials confirmed the ten percent cut, close to 1,600 employees are to be laid off by the end of the third quarter of 2008. The company has reported a net loss of no less than $396 million, meaning $0.71 per share, for the third financial quarter of 2007. The losses have also included a $120 million charge related to AMD’s last year acquisition of ATI Technologies.