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Mobile Processor Showdown
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."
Sorry guys, I left out the AMD CPU in question (to compare to the Solo): mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP)
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I just bought a new Durabook 14k myself. The Turion MT-32 inside worries me.
It starts about 51-55 degrees on light load with a voltage of 0.900
Under heavy load, like encoding a dvd, the CPU voltage reaches 1.200 (or maxed
out at 1.300 according to AMD dashboard) and the temperate starts climbing
reaching as high as 74 degrees. After stopping the CPU intensive process the
temp drops to about 64 degrees and then moves down to around 56-59 degrees at a
slower pace.
If I run Prime95 then the temp maxes out a 80 degrees!
I'm still waiting to hear back from Twinhead about this. I'm seriously considering unclocking / undervolting this laptop.
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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.
No, there is nothing wrong with the Intel chips. I am using an Intel Core Duo based laptop (Acer Aspire 5672) right now, and battery life is what you'd expect for my usage (about 2:50 for high brightness, high cpu speed, wifi via 3945abg, bluetooth/bluetooth mouse, and active internet/itunes use).
The reason they chose these two chips was that they wanted to test the AMD chip against an Intel chip which cost about the same.
It seems to me that AMD will price their chips so they will sell. If they have to price their chips at a tenth of what Intel charges for its best chips, they will. If they can't quite match Intel's performance, they will compete on price alone. Mind you, they won't give away the chips just for the joy of it. They will price them where they produce the best profit.
In any event, most people have all the computer performance they need. These days, most people won't pay double for a faster machine (gamers excepted). The bottom line is that there will still be a market for AMD chips.
Here is an interesting battery life benchmark at tomshardware:
d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/page21.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_
I'm not looking forward to it mostly because the socket has changed, so i can't upgrade my turion based laptop :(
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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.
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.
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.
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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 of the drive, and once it spins down the machine all but totally quiet (you can just hear the backlight if you put your ear right next to it).
So if you want something quiet and portable with excellent battery life, that is available today.
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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.
For power, yes, you need to consider the whole package, which they do, they aren't just measuring the CPU power consumption. They said: "We measured the power consumption of our entire test systems, except for the monitor, at the wall outlet". It appears they pretty much did what you suggested.
For performance, it's pretty much built into the tests.
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.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
They didn't include the most recent chips from either MFG. Some people are talking how the newer ones are very close in performance and power 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.
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