Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I'm waiting for vast improvements in battery life before I decide. I've waited 10 years. I can wait 10 more.
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)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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. :)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
it's somewhat pointless as they don't compare the best of each company's current offerings.
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.
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.
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!?
i disable sigs
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.
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 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.
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 :(
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
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.
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.
Centrino is not a processor, but a group of Intel technologies 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.
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 quite adequate. Why spend more money on "mobile" processors? CPU Idle also works fine for desktop PCs.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
http://www.askthevoid.com
Some people run Apache (for web development), gcc, LaTeX, etc. Do these hotel kiosks support them?
There's a big difference between a dual-stream processor (like SUN's new multi-stream offering) and a true dual-core processor. But a dual-core processor works almost exactly like two separate chips, just in a single package. In fact, for AMD, they are exactly the same, for Intel, the dual-core is a bit better off than the two separate chips since they share cache better than two separate Intel chips (but less well than any AMD offering).
As to the "more under the pedal" stuff of the GP, I can see why you say that, but it's really because the dual-core machine cannot hand all its horsepower to a single process even if it wants to. A single core chip can do so, and will in the case of a single CPU consumptive task. An OS could be designed to never hand over all the CPU to a single task and then a single core would have "more under the pedal" too. But it turns out to generally reduce performance overall.
I have had several single processor machines and several dual processor ones. I have never felt like I would never want to go back to single processor. Dual processor is nice (my current machine is dual core) but until recently, dual processor (core) just didn't make financial sense. A single core has almost always been much more cost effective than two slower processors because the two processor setup not only requires two chips, but also requires specialized motherboards (and recently big power supplies too).
But with affordable dual-core single-chip solutions that fit on run-of-the-mill motherboards it seems pretty likely that I'll have more dual-core machines in the future.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
Ok... and?
Just the chip:
760 (2M L2 cache 2A GHz 533 MHz FSB 90nm) $294
T2400 (2M L2 cache 1.83 GHz 667 MHz FSB 65nm) $294
Chip and chipset:
760 (2M L2 cache 2A GHz 533 MHz FSB) w/ Intel 915 PM Chipset and Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG $356
T2400 (2M L2 cache 1.83 GHz 667 MHz FSB) w/ Intel 945 PM Chipset and Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG $359
Don't push your fancy thermodynamics on us!