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Portables Hardware

Mobile Processor Showdown 192

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the to-the-pain dept.
AnInkle writes "The Tech Report has a head-to-head comparison between the Pentium M760 and the Turion ML-44. From the article: 'AMD has done well with Opteron in servers and the Athlon 64 in desktops, but surely AMD's K8-derived mobile competitor doesn't match up with the Pentium M. Does it?' Conventional wisdom (or marketing genius) says Pentium M's power-saving features and performance-per-watt leave AMD's Turion 64 gasping for batteries. Even though the next-gens are just around the corner, countless mobile systems will sell with these chips over the next year; find out which to choose, whether for performance, battery life or a combination of both."
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Mobile Processor Showdown More

Mobile Processor Showdown

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  • What about heat saving? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @08:39PM (#14712895) Homepage
    Am I the only one running into relatively new laptops that overheat? I shouldn't have to keep the bottom elevated on a hard surface to keep from crashes.

    • Re:What about heat saving? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @08:45PM (#14712937) Journal
      Power saving == Heat saving
      • Power saving == Heat saving

        So true. All of the power consumed by the CPU is converted into heat. Overheating, though, depends on how well the cooling system works. But even then, higher power requires more cooling, which usually means more noise and bigger size.

        This is why the the Turion's higher power under maximum load concerns me; I often leave my laptop doing something CPU intensive for hours. The system should of course cope with maximum CPU load for extended periods, but I don't want a huge cool

      • What if he is into gaming? I like to game on my laptop, and the heat is crazy.

      • Hey! (Score:2, Funny)

        by bobbuck ( 675253 )
        Don't push your fancy thermodynamics on us!
    • My first notebook, a 386 with a B&W passive matrix, got so hot it warped the case. My current one isn't particularly powerful, I mostly run word processing software and some photoshop, but there's no overheating trouble. I have to blow out the fan area every couple of days but that's about it. I think cutting edge is always going to have heat issues. I'm more concerned these days with video support and hard drive speed than processor power. Those 5400 rpm hard drives are looking pretty whimpy and the on
      • I've seen crappy laptops that overheat with any CPU you can think of (486, Pentium, PII, AMD, even Pentium-M). The commonality is the "crappy laptop" part, not the CPU.

        > I think cutting edge is always going to have heat issues.

        I think that's a lame excuse. There are vendors (IBM, RIP) that generally don't sell laptops with heat issues.
    • It has never been advisable to run a bottom vented laptop on a plush/cloth surface that could restrict the flow of air to the vents. What happens if you cover all the holes in your PC case? Eventually it will overheat.

      My Pentium M laptop rarely has heat issues, but I do have several customers with Pentium 4 based laptops that will char your thighs. Ouch.
      • Vents are irrelevant. Even side-vented laptops (like my iBook) can overheat if you put them on a cloth surface.
      • Well, then you should immediately turn around and sue the vendor for selling a laptop that is hot enough to cause serious burns. Granted, their defense will bring up the warning label saying "caution: laptop is hot" in court, but if you hire a good legal team you should be able to get around that. There's already a good precedent for this kind of thing you know.
      • A cloth surface such as a pants leg?

        One of the flaws in my late model Acer is that the air intake sits directly over the natural place for a leg to sit underneath it . . .

        hawk
    • After looking at your site for a minute, my laptop is on a hard, elevated surface.

  • I'm waiting it out (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Crowhead ( 577505 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @08:42PM (#14712918)
    I'm waiting for vast improvements in battery life before I decide. I've waited 10 years. I can wait 10 more.
    • Better batteries aren't enough. If you don't reduce the power consumption of the chips, then you wind up with a small laptop that burns your hands and/or lap every time you use it...

      • Better batteries aren't enough. If you don't reduce the power consumption of the chips, then you wind up with a small laptop that burns your hands and/or lap every time you use it...

        On the other hand, reducing the power consumption can be done in good ways and bad ways. One of the laptops here is nice, although it can't be used on a lap because it gets so hot. The battery life is decent on paper, but in reality you can't use it much on battery because the system slows down to a crawl to conserve battery

        • >Why do I need that power? Because software up until
          >now has depended on Moore's law, and require twice
          >the processing power every six months to do the
          >equivalent job at equivalent speeds.

          Well, if you *insist* on continuing to run Microsoft Word . . .

          :)


          hawk

  • mTurion MTs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @08:55PM (#14712993) Journal
    They mention in the beginning that MTs are lower power than MLs (they are 25W vs. 35W T.D.P. in fact), yet they didn't throw one into the comparison.

    That's lower power, and faster, than even the infamous Core Solo (T1300 1.66GHz 27W TDP).

    There is a 1.666GHz Core Duo LV which is lower power. But, if you don't have much use for dual-core, AMD seems the way to go.

    With all the talk about AMD not yet on 65nm it would seem AMD is still, not just competitive, but ahead of Intel in low-power CPUs, and performance. (It seems like nobody is talking about the benefits of SOI, for some reason)

    • Re:mTurion MTs (Score:3, Informative)

      by evilviper ( 135110 )
      Sorry guys, I left out the AMD CPU in question (to compare to the Solo): mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP)

      • Re:mTurion MTs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MojoStan ( 776183 )

        Sorry guys, I left out the AMD CPU in question (to compare to the Solo): mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP)

        I think it's also important to note that Core Solo (and Duo) has some architectural improvements [anandtech.com] over the Pentium M such as 667MHz FSB (up from 533MHz), DDR2-667, enhanced floating point performance, and enhanced SIMD.

        Since TFA showed a 2.0GHz Pentium M outperforming a 2.4GHz Turion in most of the important benchmarks, I think the 1.66GHz Core Solo (with its architectural improvements over the Pentium

        • Dammit. I shouldn't have pushed the "Submit" button so soon.

          Since TFA showed a 2.0GHz Pentium M outperforming a 2.4GHz Turion in most of the important benchmarks, I think the 1.66GHz Core Solo (with its architectural improvements over the Pentium M) might outperform a 1.8GHz Turion by even more.

          A closer look at all of TFA's benchmarks show the Pentium M and Turion being pretty evenly matched, overall. However, that doesn't say anything about which current low-power single core CPU (Turion MT or Core Sol

    • But, if you don't have much use for dual-core, AMD seems the way to go.

      I'm sorry, but from this post I gather that you've never had an SMP workstation before. Trust me, once you go dual, you will NEVER want to go back. I had a DEC dual P-100, then a BP6 dual Celeron 550. Smooth as butta. My current Barton setup is fast, obviously faster than the old dual Celeron 550, but still gets bogged down firing up Java, or when IE craps out, etc. With a dual machine, you always have some extra room under the peda
      • And I take it, from your post, you've never used anything other than Windows. Other operating systems don't NEED a second processor to prevent lock-ups.

        My main reasoning, though, is that people have a primary task, which they want to get done as quickly as possible. If you're doing extensive video encoding or playback, encryption, etc., you'll get a speed PENALTY with those dual core system (or a quality reduction if you do eg. multi-threaded video encoding).
        • Yes, but what would you suggest he do if he *has* to use windows?

          Maybe get one of those Dual core processors? I think that would be a keen idea!
        • '' My main reasoning, though, is that people have a primary task, which they want to get done as quickly as possible. If you're doing extensive video encoding or playback, encryption, etc., you'll get a speed PENALTY with those dual core system (or a quality reduction if you do eg. multi-threaded video encoding). ''

          Using Handbrake on MacOS X runs quite exactly twice as fast on a dual core system than on a single processor. That's not exactly what I would call a penalty. And I would really like to know how m
        • You're right as Linux has a much better load-splitting capability than does Windows, so you can kill the offending task well before it eats up all your resources. And yes, if you do one single-threaded task, a single-core CPU of equal speed will be a touch faster as the cache latency, etc. will be less as the non-existant second core will not have to snoop. But most people have several apps open at once, and that's where a dual-core system shines. Also, there are multithreaded apps out there that use both C
      • With a dual machine, you always have some extra room under the pedal, so to speak

        If you need more room under the pedal, just cut a hole in your floorboard. Works great.
    • There is a 1.666GHz Core Duo LV which is lower power.

      If it overheats, will it burn forever?

    • Re:mTurion MTs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by subsolar2 ( 147428 )
      With all the talk about AMD not yet on 65nm it would seem AMD is still, not just competitive, but ahead of Intel in low-power CPUs, and performance. (It seems like nobody is talking about the benefits of SOI, for some reason)
      AMD uses 90nm SOI ... they licensed the tech from IBM. Intel stills seems to have trouble with SOI and IIRC they developted it themselves rather than licence from IBM.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @12:11AM (#14713814)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:mTurion MTs (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 )
        Part of it is,
        /me peers through the mists of time...
        When intel was king computers cost $3000-4000 and people had no options.

        Until recently laptops have cost approximately $2000.

        Flash forward to 2006 and you see the $100 laptop and you wonder why there aren't good (feature complete, (80 gig HD, DVD burner, firewire, usb) reasonable performance laptops to match their desktop counterparts.

        The desktop price wars are stagnating and will continue but AMD seems to be releasing $700-800 laptops when those la

      • Re:mTurion MTs (Score:3, Interesting)

        by db32 ( 862117 )
        My guess is that Pentium M is 32 bit, and Turion is 64 bit. I kinda doubt they did any testing of 64bit applications as the benchmarks seem to be limited to Windows use and not Linux (since Windows really isn't that far into the 64 bit world yet) and doing 64 bit benchmarking would be a tad unfair because the Turion would get a score...poor or good...while the Pentium M would just get a 0 for being unable to do the test.
      • There are five reasons you'd stick with AMD on this one:

        1. You want to use 64-bit apps on your notebook. (I know, you can't stuff more than 2GB RAM in notebooks today, let alone > 4GB and the only fully-functional 64-bit OS is Linux/BSD, but...)

        2. You can get AMD notebooks for a a couple hundred dollars less than an equivalent Pentium M notebook.

        3. You have your heart set on one particular notebook model and it happens to have an AMD chip in it.

        4. You want to use your notebook to encode video/audio with.

    • I agree, it's too bad they didn't test the Turion MT. These benchmarks conclude that (1) the Turion ML-44 "only" offer performances similar to the Pentium M 760, and that (2) the Turion system consume as a whole a third more power than the Pentium system at full load (but, good news, a bit less at idle). From my point of view, in order to improve (1) and (2), I would:

      1. Design a next-gen Turion processor with a dual-channel memory controller, in order to be on par with the Pentium M and because most bench

  • What i really want! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @08:57PM (#14713005)
    personally, i would settle for a 700MHz PC (running linux of coarse) that lasted until the cow came home (it's a small farm :P ). it would probably be best to use the ARM archatecture though. im not interested in running Quake 4 when all im doing is writing a college paper, browsing and chatting... isn't that what a desktop computer is for? well, that and adding fancy lights, a see-through panel, oh... and not to mention the harddrive with a window. :)
    • I also want one! It's a laptop... not a desktop. I just want the damn thing to work without me having to worry about running out of power.

      I hope manufacturers realize this and start releasing cool, energy efficient (and cheap?), possibly slow laptops that run some flavor of Linux---for basic word processing/software development jobs.

      Then again, maybe that $100 laptop will be that. I can't wait.

    • Re:What i really want! (Score:3, Informative)

      by slaker ( 53818 )
      An IBM T20 would probably fit the bill very nicely. Around 800MHz but with modern comforts like DVD+CD-R and support for that all important full GB of RAM; they support dual batteries and I believe there's an appropriate UltraBase station + battery. I'm not sure how long a loaded-with-batteries T20 lasts on a one charge. It's longer than an 8 hour workday, at least.

      Plus they're probably dirt cheap by now.

    • Re:What i really want! (Score:2, Informative)

      by JanneM ( 7445 )
      For what it's worth, I use a Panasonic CF-R3 with a 1.1Ghz Pentium M. Battery life in practical use (writing and surfing using the wireless card) is about 6 hours. If I don't use a network connection I can easily reach 7 hours of actual use on a charge - great for conferences where I can leave the power adapter at the hotel. And the machine is good enough that I use it as my main computer.

      It sure doesn't hurt that it's small and light and has no active cooling at all - the only sound is the very low murmur
    • what is killing batteries faster is the screens. Throw in CD and DVD drives which some people seem to think run on magic and you have the recipe for short battery life. One industry that needs to wake up is the game industry which loves to have CD/DVDs that must be loaded to play and are accessed during play. Hello!

      The processors already have technology to slow down when not being used to their fullest extent. Now what is needed are methods to reduce reliance on spinning up the harddrive; or make it mor
  • "Turion 64 test system consumed a third again more power than the Pentium M system at 100% CPU load".

    I guess there is always a price to be paid for more performance.
    • What would you say about the argument given by the author, that depending on your usage pattern, a processor may spend more time idle than active?

    • But it didn't... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bradleyland ( 798918 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:24PM (#14713129)
      But it didn't really come out ahead in overall performance. Plus it costs almost $70 more than the Pentium M it was compared to.

      There's a lot of AMD pole smoking going on in the comments and it's starting to make me nauseous. I love AMD's desktop processors, but I'm in no way a brand loyalist. I can't stand the thought of buying an inferior product based on brand. The Pentium M still comes away with a lead in this test when you factor in the cost difference and power consumption.

      • yeah, it's pretty bad on here right now... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by YesIAmAScript ( 886271 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @11:01PM (#14713560)
        I thought it was great when the smarter part of the PC community refused to play along when Intel offered a poor solution for the customer by trying to make everyone use RDRAM. AMD took the lead on price/performance, and Athlon was the big thing.

        When Intel finally freed themselves from the RDRAM shackles, they debuted their 800MHZ HT chips and showed everyone that there it was possible to get higher performance with only moderately higher power levels.

        But then when Intel went to their 22-stage pipeline power-hog disasters, the community did the right thing and moved to Athlon 64 and X2. AMD was providing higher performance at much better costs and using less power.

        The community's move to AMD's superior solution spurred Intel to make a huge change in their strategy, abandoning NetBurst (P4) and moving to a much better solution.

        When the community follows the best solution, the industry has responded.

        Which is why I find it baffling that people let the wool be pulled over their eyes on AMD's mobile offerings. They back AMD unconditionally against Intel and make excuses about it too.

        Ever since the Pentium M LVs and ULVs, AMD has not been able to keep up on performance/Watt. And if you compare the most recent offerings from both companies it is abundantly clear.

        So I say please, make the wise move. Continue to back the company that is making the right moves. And that seems to mean Intel for low-power solutions and AMD for high-performance solutions. It could change at any time, so keeping informed is essential.
        • By 800MHz HT chips I meant 800FSB HT chips. The standard at the time was 133MHz for a memory bandwidth of 1.0GB/sec. (AMD was stuck at even less!) With the 800FSB (200MHz quad-pumped) chips and dual-channel DDR RAM, Intel opened up the bandwidth floodgates, providing 6.4GB/sec.

          This made a huge performance difference in applications that needed bandwidth, like gaming.

          Hyperthreading was a help, it wasn't the boost Intel made it out to be, but it was helpful in getting the most out of Intel's long-pipeline chi

        • Which is why I find it baffling that people let the wool be pulled over their eyes on AMD's mobile offerings.

          Don't be fooled.

          Many of the posts, stories and positive/negative moderations on slashdot these days are just lying marketing astroturfers [wikipedia.org] and socket puppets [wikipedia.org], fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion. This post [slashdot.org] for example but they can be much more manipulative with Dorothy Dix'ers [wikipedia.org] and various other forms of fake "conversations" and straw man [wikipedia.org] arguments.

          This single

        • After reading the test, I think things are not that clear-cut.
          The Turion and the Pentium M were overall comparable in performance, and while the Turion consumed more energy than the Pentium M under load, it consumed a bit less while idle. Which is the predominant state for most usage patterns.
          So if I had to choose between the two chips, I would probably go by price.
      • The Pentium M still comes away with a lead in this test when you factor in the cost difference and power consumption.

        As for power consumption, that would depend entirely on how you use your laptop. At idle, which is what most laptops are at most of the time when you are just writing a document or doing email/web, the AMD has lower power consumption than the Pentium M. That one is a toss up depending on your usage patterns.

        But you are entirely right about cost.

      • How can you "love" a processor, without being brand loyalist ?
        You like sillicon ?

  • AMD's impressive improvements (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:03PM (#14713039)
    I have to say that I'm impressed with AMD's offering here. For a while I've been under the impression that they were being trounced by Intel in the mobile market (which I'm sure they are in term of sales). However, this review shows that they have improved to a point where they are pretty much on a par with Intel.

    They still have a bit of work to do with the maximum power consumption, but they've managed to get the idle consumption down to where the Pentium M is with similar overall performance. Good work AMD.

  • no centrino duo? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:04PM (#14713047)
    it's somewhat pointless as they don't compare the best of each company's current offerings.
    • B/c absolutely everyone immediately has the best hardware on the market, right?

      -bZj

    • Centrino is not a processor, but a group of Intel technologies [intel.com] bundled under one brandname.

      Not only that, but isn't comparing the Intel Core Duo to the single core Turion like apples to oranges? Single core vs. single core makes for an even comparison.

    • Re:no centrino duo? (Score:4, Informative)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @10:26PM (#14713400) Homepage
      I was actually pleased that they compared like price points, rather than just taking the fastest part.

      The problem with comparing the high-end is that these two companies leapfrog over each other every 6 months. And you seldom compare apples-to-apples that way. You might end up with a dual core power-hungry part against a single-core low-power part. For this test, they compared matching price points within the same series. That makes sense to me.

  • Conclusion? Perhaps not fair (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:09PM (#14713068)
    This test pits a Pentium M against a Turion 64. Granted, this was the comparison for 6 months ago. But Intel now has the Duo Core (Yonah) processor which has a slightly different architecture than Pentium M.

    Not to mention that while Conroe and Merom will be based on the same design principles it is a fresh design.

    I believe the key to Intel's new design will not be its close approximation to the Athlon in performance. The secret is in performance per watt, as they say. High performance computing with as little engergy consumption and heat dissipation as possible. The Athlon 64 architecture looked cool compared to the toaster oven called Netburst, but even against the old Pentium III it is quite hot and hungry. Lifestyle PCs, laptops, and blade servers will all favor the much cooler design from Intel.

    While Athlon 64 will continue to compete on performance and price, without a major architectural change they will be stuck in the hot seat for the next couple of years. And it will only get worse before it gets better because Intel's chip design is truly superior, only held back by a dated bus architecture slated for replacement in 2007.

    While Intel will "win" technologically, they will burn a lot of capital to remain competitive until they do. Lots of Pentium M chips have been stockpiled. By the time Yonah reaches mass production it will be replaced by Merom. Lots of stockpiled Pentium D chips that will be replaced by Conroe. Intel will need to slash prices for processors nobody wants anymore only to flood the market with brand new PC's that don't need to be replaced by the superior technology they so desperately need to release.

    Maybe Intel will sooner push the P4's into a landfill than cut their own throats? Or maybe 2006 will be a good year to start up your own server farm in the basement.

  • PentiumM is dead... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:14PM (#14713090)
    The chip to compare to the Turion is the Intel Core Duo. It has superior floating point performance to the PentiumM, SSE3 support, and two cores instead of one.

    In other words, it crushes the Turion.

  • reversal (Score:5, Funny)

    by 80 85 83 83 89 33 ( 819873 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:17PM (#14713102) Journal
    hmmm, an intel performing more work per clock cycle than an equivilant amd chip, while using only 3/4 the watts under load! what a reversal from the norm. AND the intel chip is faster in gaming!?

  • you must compare both proc and chipset (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LOTHAR, of the Hill ( 14645 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:32PM (#14713160)
    The AMD processors embed the DDR controller into the processor. There is no FSB to speak of. The AMD Northbridge takes the hypertransport from the processor and splits it to PCIe, SATA, and your other peripherals. The DDR core that is embedded with the AMD processor is a heat hog, but at least there is no FSB, which is worse. The dual core Opteron has two memory channels on the processor.

    The Intel processor does not embed the DDR controller. The DDR controller is part of the northbridge for both single and dual core designs. There is an 500-800MHz front side bus connecting the proc to the NB in Intel arch.

    To properly compare to AMD power consumption with Intel, you have to compare the both processor and the chipset. These fundamental differences make direct processor power comparisons meaningless.

  • Tests are a bit frustrating... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @09:52PM (#14713254) Journal
    It's pretty annoying that they put the NVidia card in for some benchmarks, and then didn't just LEAVE IT IN. They explicitly mention in one test that they think ATI graphics are having trouble with OpenGL (no shock, ATI drivers have sucked rat fur in this area for many years). Instead of twigging to 'hey, let's set this to be as fair as we can', they just accept the screwed up results! That's really dumb... they're not thinking it through. They claim to be testing the CHIPS, not the LAPTOPS.

    I get so frustrated with benchmarks in general... they so often miss really obvious stuff like this. If you're trying to test a CPU, then you do your best to remove as many other variables as possible. Use the same damn video card. Test what you SAY you are testing. Sheesh.

    I think it would have been interesting to see power consumption scores both with and without the NVidia card, too. It'd be nice to try to separate the video power requirements from the CPU/chipset requirements.
  • Amd can have a nice offering, the laptop with AMD cpu are a little less easy to find and don't have the others things that made them shine !
  • I have ALOT of experience with Laptops, I have 3 personal laptops and 1 provided by my company. I thought it might be helpful to some if I posted brief notes about two of them.

    HP ZD8110 - 3Ghz P4 HT, Radeon X600 PCI-E 128MB, 2GB Ram, 17inch Widescreen, Ubuntu Breezy - This is a workhorse. It does overheat periodically if it does not get full venting from the three bottom mounted fans. It has even overheating during an overnight compile session once or twice. During heavy use acpi -V shows me CPU temp
    • HP ZD8110 - 3Ghz P4 HT, Radeon X600 PCI-E 128MB, 2GB Ram, 17inch Widescreen, Ubuntu Breezy - This is a workhorse. It does overheat periodically if it does not get full venting from the three bottom mounted fans

      I think you define "workhorse" differently than I do if you can have a machine overheat and still qualify. About a year ago I bought another model from this series of awful HP machines with too many desktop parts in them, and returned it two days later because overheated and crashed regularly during
  • Any self-respecting geek that's flying to Japan has an extra battery or an inline APC battery, etc. The power consumption life only counts in SoCal and Houston where they pay $1/kw. Heat dispersion is another thing. Got a nice fan? Good. You need to blow that stack with some cool breeze.

    Where does it matter: bang for the buck. Both seem to do that. AMD has better math, but this is no surprise as their FPU has eaten Intel's for years now. Bad memory moves? Ah yes, that damn FS bus. Sigh.

    The bucks? The same,

  • Interesting match (Score:3, Informative)

    by tetromino ( 807969 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @10:05PM (#14713306)
    The two processors represent two quite different approaches to getting the most performance. The Pentium M has an enormous cache and good memory bandwidth. The Turion, on the other hand, has much better memory latency as well as AMD's traditionally strong scalar arithmetic.

    The benchmarks come down to:
    If the code and data fits in Pentium M's cache, Pentium M wins hands down.
    For tasks like media encoding, where the problem doesn't fit into PM's cache, Turion wins hands down.
    If you are spending much time at 100% CPU usage, Pentium M will give you better battery life.

    Oh, and games? Both suck about equally well. If you want to play games, get a desktop.

  • How about CPU Idle instead of mobile processors (Score:3, Interesting)

    by msbsod ( 574856 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @10:35PM (#14713437)
    The author assumed that a notebook CPU runs with 100% load. I have two applications for a notebook: office stuff like writing a message or reading a document, or playing games. Even the latter hardly requires 100% CPU load all the time. For these applications I find a cheap notebook with a software solution like CPU Idle [cpuidle.de] quite adequate. Why spend more money on "mobile" processors? CPU Idle also works fine for desktop PCs.
    • If you had RTFA, or just ya know RTA'd you would see that they did measure both the idle and the at load power usage.

      AMD won on the idle performance, but lost on the 100% usage lvl as far as power consumption goes. And mention was made that notebooks are very very rarely at 100% CPU usage.
    • Bad Mods! No cookie! This guy is just astroturfing to sell his crappy commercial Windows software, where free programs like 8rdavcore (or cpufreq modules for Linux) will do a far, far better job.

      The author DOES NOT ASSUME that a notebook CPU runs with 100% load. Power figures for both idle and 100% loads are listed, and the author mentions that notebooks will likely be idle more often than not.

  • Intel is the clear winner (Score:4, Insightful)

    by estoll ( 443779 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @11:17PM (#14713621) Homepage
    Intel beat out the AMD in nearly every performance test. They try and make an argument for the AMD on power consumption. I'll paraphrase: The AMD chip uses less energy in an idle state and since most usage is idle, the AMD chip uses less energy.

    AMD is clearly the overall winner if you don't use your computer.
    • Was your CPU running at 100% when you were typing that post? I personally like having longer battery life, and most of the time the CPU is closer to idle than to full usage. On a desktop OR a laptop.
      • and most of the time the CPU is closer to idle than to full usage

        True, but the benchmarks tell more of a story than what the reviewer said. The difference was about 5% at zero load (favor AMD) at full load the difference was 25%. (favor Intel) Thats not just 5x the difference, it's 8x the difference. Three watts difference compared to twenty four watts. (3/24=8)
  • One thing the Turion's have that the Intel Mobiles don't is 64bit support. Is that an issue? For the average user, probably not for a while. Although, I imagine that a few corporations will try to start standardizing on 64bit hardware in (a long) preparation for 64bit software.
  • Okay, we've seen the benchmarks for 32 bit operation. Let's see what happens when we move to 64-bit stuff.

    Oh, wait... the P4M doesn't do that. Guess we know the winner there.
    • What use does anyone have for a 64-bit laptop today? Run Oracle in very large memory configurations? No. I really don't see the point in rushing out to get a 64-bit laptop. Sure, maybe in the future, but then only because all software is written 64-bit.

      Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD user. Though, my laptop is a Pentium M and I'm very happy with it.
  • There are a lot of comments about "the Pentium M came out ahead in most benchmarks". That's true of the graphics benchmarks using an AGP video card. (Which is curious given the speed difference of the FSB in each setup.) I do have to wonder how this is relevant in a test that is supposed to be comparing laptop performance, where there isn't generally an option to upgrade the graphics. Maybe this suggests that to get a relevant comparison between laptops, you need to benchmark the actual systems you're c

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