AMD Launches Turion Mobile Processor

justforaday writes "Earlier today, AMD launched their Turion mobile processor, which is based on the AMD64 architecture. This is set to compete directly with Intel's Centrino (Pentium-M) line of processors. Chips will initially be clocked between 1.6 and 2.0 GHz. Looks like we should be seeing some nice low-powered 64-bit notebooks in the near future."

Comments

What I'm interested in...

[PornMaster]

Are any of the major motherboard manufacturers going to put out a micro-ATX or smaller desktop motherboard for this to build a media PC upon?

Digital AlphaBook - 64 bit notebook in 1998

[BiggRanger]

I have a Digital AlphaBook, the first 64 bit notebook computer! 266 MHz Alpha Processor (EV4 I think) 128 Meg RAM, and runs OpenVMS! Best of all I got it back in 1998. Nobody was even thinking 64 bit desktops back then. And you know what, it still rocks. I've rebuilt the battery pack and still use it today. You should see poeples face when VMS is booting up and it goes into the DEC windows manager.

speed boost... but detremental power savings...

[mp3phish]

Yes.. you can take the advice of the parent poster... but let me explain a couple things which dictate that 7200RPM laptop drives are not always better....

1) Drive density: a laptop drive at 80GB is roughly twice as dense (bytes per square inch) than an 80GB desktop hard drive

2) Head travel time: In a 2.5in laptop drive, the hard drive head does not have to traverse more than ~1in (from center to outter track) of the drive to do any given seek. A desktop drive must traverse roughly 50% more distance (and time) on random seeks

3) Heat: 5400RPM drives produce significantly less heat than 7200RPM drives.. on top of this, a 5400RPM drive built with the same quality as a 7200RPM drive has significantly longer average lifetime.

4) Noise: Equivilently built drives one running at 5400RPM and one at 7200RPM. The 7200RPM is significantly louder and produces high pitched noise (nowadays, all laptop drives are hydro bearings so you can't cop out and say that a cheaper 5400RPM drive will use cheaper ball bearings... like you used to be able to say)

5) battery life: less heat == less watts == less power consumption. Remember that the hard drive is the second largest drain on your battery when talking about centrino/turion systems (LCD is the first). In a P4 laptop then the CPU uses more power than the drive. a 5400RPM or 4200RPM drive has faster spin up times. It has lower sustained power consumption, and will generally give you a longer battery life on the order of an half to full hour or so in a midsized notebook using default battery.

6) Data integrity/ruggedness: a slower spinning hard drive will not have as detremental of an affect on your data if the drive is bumped during reads/writes. Think of it as hitting a large speed bump going 54MPH vs going 72MPH.

Now some of this needs explanation: (1) tells about drive density. What this means is that a 7200RPM 3.5in drive is about as fast as a 5400RPM 2.5in drive in sustained reads/writes. (2) tells about seek time (latency). A laptop drive at 5400RPM has a faster seek than a desktop at 5400RPM. I will admit that a 7200RPM desktop drive has faster seeks, but not significantly so. A faster spinning drive can seek faster only when the head is in place and it must wait for the drive to rotate to the corect angle in order to read the requested data. It does NOT make the head travel faster. For this reason high RPM speeds are good and well for seek time... but using smaller platters is also a very good way to reduce seek time. Not to mention that loading programs and loading large video files or photoshop files, etc... are not highly seek dependant. They are sequential read dependant. Database accesses, or accessing a badly fragmented hard drive are cases where faster seek will help you out. But in a laptop system where you are loading programs and files and keep your disk defragmented it will do you very little good.

Now.. I'm not saying that 10K and 15K rpm drives are bad... they are great for seek time and they are great for high transaction/sec databases... What they are overkill for is desktop systems which the user would typically be loading programs or transferring files from one disk to another or loading large files... Because most 10K drives are around 36GB or 74GB... and they are actually marginally _SLOWER_ at sequential read/write than cheaper and larger 7200RPM drives on the desktop....

now.. Apply all of the above to a laptop 5400RPM drive vs the standard desktop drive of 7200RPM.. I hope you are able to see what I'm getting at. a 7200RPM drive in a laptop is significantly faster than an equivilently sized desktop drive at 7200RPMs... Anybody who says they feel a slowdown on 5400RPM laptop drives vs. a 7200RPM desktop drive is either using very low GB laptop drive, or very large GB desktop drive, or is just fooling themselves... In general, a 5400RPM laptop drive performs approximately the same as a 7200RPM desktop drive in most end user desktop applications...