AMD recently unveiled its 65nm AMD Turion 64 X2 processors at an event alongside NVIDIA and Broadcom. Up until now, AMD's mobile processors have been able to resist the change to a smaller manufacturing process. As AMD continues to rapidly refresh and convert its Fab 36 manufacturing facility, more manufacturing capabilities are being opened up to the company.

Intel has held an advantage in process technology over AMD for quite some time now, and originally moved its mobile processors to 65nm in 2006. Reducing the manufacturing process usually results in lower power consumption and lower operating voltages, which also means lesser cooling requirements. All of these characteristics are key to the success of a mobile platform, which explains why Intel and AMD are both aggressively refining their manufacturing process.

The performance changes, however, aren't always immediately drastic. It is common practice for companies to shrink a familiar CPU with a finer manufacturing process before creating a completely new chip on an unknown process. This allows the semiconductor to mature the manufacturing process with a familiar design, clearing out process design related issues, before moving on to producing new chips on the smaller design process. This means that although the performance changes of the current 65nm Turions might not be groundbreaking, the new chips will certainly allow AMD to refine its 65nm process technology and work out design issues before they launch their next-generation processors.

In an attempt to further extend battery life, the new AMD-based platforms, which were the main focus of the event, will use the recently launched AMD M690 chipset which has a new memory technology called Display Cache. The technology allows the CPU to operate in low-power mode without accessing system memory. Combined with the new 65nm design process, AMD hopes to extend mobile battery life to 5 hours.