Taipei - Via today announced the K8N800A chipset for AMD's upcoming Turion 64 processor that will make its way into in thin and light notebooks sometime during the first half of this year and compete with Intel's Pentium-M family.

AMD is not yet motivated to about its Turion 64 processor officially, but Via's announcement of a Turion chipset indicates that a product introduction may be happening in the not too distant future. The K8N800A is described as low-power chipset for high-performance and thin and light notebooks with "an advanced graphics and display engine" and support for the power saving features of the processor.

According to Via, the chipset can also be used in combination Mobile Athlon 64 and Mobile Sempron processors and integrate S3's UniChrome Pro integrated graphics processor (IGP). The 128-bit graphics engine provides dual pipelines and support for shared DDR memory. Via promises users "flawless digital video playback" and an "enhanced video rendering and a rich visual experience." The IGP also offers an external AGP 8x port to enable graphics processor upgrades.

The K8N800A fits into expectations from analysts who predicted that AMD is likely to count on third-party manufacturers to create a platform that is capable to compete with Intel's Centrino technology. AMD is not expected to offer Centrino-like chipset packages with integrated graphics, audio and Wi-Fi capability.

AMD's current roadmap lists Turion to be due during the first half of the year. The company declined to provide details about the processor.

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