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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."
There has got to be something wrong with the new Intel chips Apple is using. No one from Apple wants to talk about battery life. After all the talk about 'performance per watt' something has to be seriously wrong with power consumption.
It is too bad Jobs refused to pay for a mobile 970 chip to go along with the killer quad-970 workstations they are shipping right now, Apple would be rocking right now instead of plummeting in the stock market.
Sure the new laptops are thinner, lighter, and use less power but there is a drawback. PERFORMANCE SUCKETH! The powersavers are especially slow and underperforming. The only decent laptops are the battery draining monsters with the full size heatsinks, real video cards, and faster harddrives.
I am not entirely sure why people even keep buying laptops with hotels now offering Internet kiosks. Why lug a laptop, have to show it to homeland security at the airport, then worry about it getting broken, damaged or destroyed just so you can run e-mail, excel, and word?
Incidentally, I think a laptop is one of the few purchases in which the value of the item depreciates faster than of a new car. That's impressive.
I suppose it's simply an inherent fact of capitalism that even if (and I have no doubts WHEN) AMD produces a more efficient cpu for laptops it won't help them nearly as much as it should. Intel simply has all the hardware contracts with OEM manufacturers and the enthusiast base for do-it-yourself laptops isn't remotely comparable to that of desktops. Besides brownie points among those in the know (of which there are few) what does AMD have to gain from putting so much effort into mobility processors? They're still trapped in their much smaller market. The average user has no clue what Centrino means. They see Ghz and pass judgement. The average consumer (and thus, the almighty dollar) tends not to understand that not all Hertz in the CPU world are created equally.