At Computex 2008 in Taiwan, AMD has unveiled the Puma notebook computer at a press conference yesterday. Conceived after the merger of AMD and ATI, this notebook attempts to bring together HD video and gaming in a 15″ notebook computer. There is a side by side demo of Half Life 2 at the 45m30s mark. And the Puma demo at the 50m mark.

As one who is not easily impressed by new hardware, I was by this machine. It easily handled Vista with an HD background running, an HD video playing, and an HD game running. I didn’t see any slowdowns or dropped frames. Of all the features displayed, I was particularly interested in the dynamic scaling of the video. With the Crossfire Xpress the two video devices, yes two. Can be combined when gaming or watching HD movies. Then when you go mobile, the machine defaults to the integrated video device to save power. Nice. When back on power, the machine reenables the discrete device for the optimum viewing experience.

The units are in production now, and should hit store shelves later this month. So much for that Dragon thingy. I can’t wait to get my hands on this beast. The next milestone, “Fusion” is expected second half of 2009. Also expect the RV770 GPU in q3 of this year.

AMD is back in a big, big way.