Big in depth Turion 64 vs Pentium M comparison! - Page 6

I'm disappointed that AMD hasn't made more of an effort to get it into the hands of consumers! I mean, this thing could easily make a killing, and I can only hope that they're using this time to build up a lot of product support before releasing it. 8) The Ferrari BIOS may not support it at the moment, but its only going to be so long before an update solves that problem. Plus, the BIOS is the only thing holding it back.

But I still have a question--what does PowerNow do that decreases the load 33% more than the Pentium-M's SpeedStep? I mean, neither software needs to be particurally complex, and its not like there are some kind of hidden features that can only be shut down by one or the other. And considering Acer computers use a custom program to manage power control, wouldn't that factor into the battery test as well?

Unleaded, good comments posted, but some of these people will probably never understand how the economy works. Competition = innovation (improvement).

Redmumba, yes that was about my only real complaint with the article, was the battery tests. They should have looked at those results and thought, "Something is wrong here." And then come up with a solution or at least a cause/effect, and posted their findings or reasons as to why. I KNOW for a FACT that the Pentium loses more than double the time they give it, when under heavy load.

Yes, we can all get along.. some people just refuse to.
-Ransom

Well if you believe AMD's story, part of the problem is that Intel is putting pressure on manufacturers and retailers to sell only Intel based products even though their chips are on par or better than Intel's and sell at a lower price.

If you believe Intel's side, AMD is just a hack chip maker who can't take the competition anymore and had to resort to sueing the market leader to make ends meet.

I agree. It's crap that Dell won't sell anything but Intel in their notebooks. I guess if they want to work that way, then fine (and it probably got them a huge price cut on Intel chips), but I personally won't buy from them.

Intel wants to own the market, and AMD wants some of that market, so Intel is going to war with them. Which side to believe?

I think the reason why the debate exists in this subject and dicussion on what is better is due to for the past so and so. The Turion was viewed as an inferior chip. In very single benchmark people showed off P-M as being far more superior and Turion way below. Including headlines like "Turion No Centrino killer". I think the fault here though was AMD themselves who rigged the benchmark tests in their introduction of turion. This was then revieled and many people went out to get their revenge or something.

This benchmark does infact show that Turion can be a "Centrino Killer", not because it dramaticly overpowers the P-M, but because it can stand neck in neck and that ordering a Turion or a Pentium M will diliver similar performance and the Turion chip is cheaper. It also provides more "future proofing".

Tuurion is nt a centrino killer it delivers the same preformance or lower and less battery life more heat but is cheaper so it would make a good budget notebook. I see what your saying..

I take it laptop<3 that you didnt bother to look at the comparison since you are spewing the old line that has now been disproven.

no i looked at the comparison I just think its biased just as you turion thought the other comparion of the pentium m crushing the amd was.

Actually, the Turion technology is more than three years old (counting from the original date of release). It is basically the same CPU as the Opteron released in the first half of 2003. There have been a few tweaks here and there, but there are no core differences to speak of. So, no, Turion is by no means a "new" tech. It might even be Dothan that is the more fresh tech...

Also, Laptop<3, aren't you still comparing laptops with different battery capacity to one another? If so, what kind of information are you expecting to get from that? Just curious.

And basing any conclusions on power consumption by looking at temps/heat is quite deceiving. Especially when the systems compared aren't even using the same enclosure and cooling system... It's basically pointless.

There is a difference to talk about The architecture of the chip and the technology used. The Pentium M architecture pretty much stayed the same, but it had upgrades in technology. Same goes for the Turion. If you look at the MT 37 chip comparisons to the MT 34, you will notice that the MT 37 has some improved technology. Comming up with new architecture is a very expensive process that requires alot of research. As for Opteron, Opteron is a really great chip you can't deny that, but ofcourse it is 3 years outdated.

Well maybe one day there will be a motherboard that supports both intel and AMD equally and is interchangable with all the hardware built in, then we can finally put a rest to wich processor stands where. Then all we can argue is if it was windy that day or not to tweak the performance 0.1fps.

ahm...where did the "lower" stick in there? But yes it is effective for the budget and a great alternative. The performance may vary to what your doing but as stated its pretty much equal. Unless you are really tuned to doing lets say 3d modeling and even 1fps makes a difference then maybe you can choose one over the other. As for those that use their notebooks for games and other things. You won't notice much issue. In no case will once chip make it any noticably worse then another.

Also, about saying that this review is bias like Gamepc, I wouldn't say that. The AMD benchmark they first released was Bias. See the gamepc showed that the pentium M defeated the turion by a large margin in everything. Honostly speaking, do you think AMD would release a competitor chips if it wasn't similar in performance.

Though we have to keep in mind, for this review he used an ML37 chip, in msot others, the ML 34 was used. And as I said too, if the ML 37 is liek the MT37(setting watts aside) then conservation of battery life is different and so is the processing capacity.

What we could be looking here is maybe a superiority of the ML37 to the usually comapraed ML34 in previouse reviews.

It could also be that the 2.0ghz on the P-M side performance is not as good gap wise as the 1.8ghz P-M chip.

Are you talking about process (manufacturing) technology? Ohh, and the Turion MT-37 and MT-34 are identical chips. They are manufactured alongside on the same process. They are just different speed bins.

The Opteron that you're calling outdated is pretty much identical to the ones sold today. They feature lower power consumption because of the smaller feature size, but they perform the same, since the architecture is virtually unchanged. The same goes for Athlon64 and Turion, which are virtually identical to the Opteron.

What I'm saying is that there's no point in waiting for Turion to "mature", since Turion is the result of an architecture that has matured over the last 2.5 years. Turion simply is the latest version of the K8 architecture, the E revision.

Having said this, I can't really say I understand the meaning of your post...

i cant even understand the blabbering of half the people posting in this thread... some of you people (laptop<3 for instance) are just fkin going into fanboy mode and spewing anything you can to discredit the opposition. Doesn't even make any sense. Back your posts up with credible evidence and stop wasting peoples time with 8 pages of crap. Dont just say "omg well this review said that P-M is l33tor than turion because it did better in this synthetic bench mark even tho the specs dont match bbut whatever why use punctuation when all i want to say is that C3NTR!NO ROX."

I am aware that the MT37 and the MT34 are the same chip, but when lookign at results of the MT 37 over the MT 34, power consumption wise, the MT 37 can underclock at MT 34 and have a round 20watts with same capacity.

As for outdated, maybe that was a bit ahrsh of a word, but if you buy a pc today/ 1 day, its 1 day outdated, 2 days, its 2 day outdated. Outdated does not mean its not functioning or running very well I'm jsut saying newer technologies are avaialbe that can be incorpirated.

On a side note, outdated means to no longer be up to date technology.

I know its symantic's but it make's a difference. The Turion's are up to date technology thus they are not outdated.

As for the rest of this thread, it's had it's up's and down's but over all it's been informative. I give it a B+.

Well, maybe I wasn't clear on what I was getting at before. Some people in this thread basically wrote:

"Turion is new tech and thus we shouldn't be surprised if it beats the comparably old Pentium-M Dothan."

I simply wrote that the Turion actually is quite the opposite. It is based on maybe one of the last revisions of an architecture that has had 2.5 years to mature. When it comes to the process technology it is based on, it's the same thing. The 90nm SOI process used is the second (and likely last) version of AMDs 90nm process used for desktop CPUs. The one thing that it does seem to have is less power hungry transistors, although this might have been a rumor.

So, despite having a snazzy new name, the Turion is not to be considered new tech.

Hope it's clear what I mean now!