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AMD Plants Turion Line of Mobile Chips
dsginter writes "Today, AMD has blessed us with their Turion line of chips. Though it is supposed to compete with Intel's Centrino line, with such a name, one has to wonder if AMD is going after the Celeron, the name of which is derived from the latin word, 'celer', meaning 'fast' or 'swift', as in 'celery' - the fastest of all vegetables."
It's "Pentium M".
The processors themselves have the codenames Banias (1MB 130nm part) and Dothan (2MB 90nm part).
These AMD processors are most likely to be revision E0 core Athlon 64s. The E0 core is said to reduce power consumption by 25% over the D0 core. If processors have a 25W TDP already in the A64M range, then AMD should easily be able to get it down to 20W to compete with the Pentium M.
Of course, the A64M will have half a northbridge incorporated into the processor, something that isn't included in the Pentium M TDP at the moment. Also the definition of Intel's TDP is different from AMD's TDP. Whilst arguments reign over the exact difference, it is agrees that Intel's processors generally run much closer to their TDP figure than AMD's.
Also, the 533MHz Dothan processor, until recently, had a 27W TDP figure, because of the faster bus.
Stinkiest of all fruits.
AMD doesn't need to release a whole new line of processors just to compete with the Celeron -- they've had the Celeron beaten for years. AMD's Duron line was consistently cheaper and faster than Celeron -- I refer you to any one of a number of tech sites. Anandtech had a good "budget processor" article comparing Durons and Celerons a while back. Tom's Hardware would do too.
More recently, AMD released the Sempron, meant to replace the Duron as its budget-level processor. Consider Anandtech's conclusion from a Sempron vs. Celeron test they did last July:
"Sempron, at a glance, surpasses its goal to be a powerful budget processor. Cheaper than the current fastest Intel Celeron, both flavors of Sempron that we tested here outperform the competition in almost every test."
In the performance market segment, Intel and AMD have been locked in battle for ages -- sometimes one is up, sometimes the other -- but if you're building a budget system, AMD offers more bang for less buck.
I'll be interested to see how this unfortunately named "Turion" chip compares to the PentiumM.
"Intel didn't design the Centrino CPU's...some 3rd party Indian fab did. And they look a lot more like an AMD or Motorola chip than an Intel."
Sorry, that's just wrong. The Pentium M is based on a Pentium III core, and it was designed by Intel engineers in Israel.
If A64M had a 25W TDP even after the 25% reduction, I'd be extremely surprised.
Maybe it draws that when in sleep mode...
I think you mean the 2.0 GHz Dothan with it's 533MHz bus.
Although I applaud low power efforts, the 1.1 Ghz low voltage Dothan is suposedly under 7W, which beats the hell out of basically everything if all you are calculating is bogomips per watt.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Are you stupid? Or being sarcastic? Pentium Ms ARE Centrinos. Or at least they fall under the Centrino category.
> Although I applaud low power efforts, the 1.1 Ghz low voltage Dothan is suposedly under 7W, which beats the hell out of basically everything if all you are calculating is bogomips per watt.
/proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
My 1.1GHz ULV Dothan reports:
$ cat
state count: 5
active state: P0
states:
*P0: 1100 MHz, 5500 mW, 10 uS
P1: 1000 MHz, 5000 mW, 10 uS
P2: 900 MHz, 4500 mW, 10 uS
P3: 800 MHz, 4300 mW, 10 uS
P4: 600 MHz, 4000 mW, 10 uS