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Turion 64 AMD's worst Failure

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Sevin7

Member
Joined
Aug 1, 2004
Location
Atlanta, GA
So im looking into buying a new laptop this summer before i start college. I want a laptop that is a mix between portabliity and power, atleast 3 hours of battery life, and atleast a mobile 6600 (or x700). Now it comes down to cpu, i wanted to wait for the Turion 64, becuase of its low power consumption, 64 bit processing, and possible higher performance than the Pentium M. But after reading many benmarks, it turns out the Turion 64 only beat the Pentium M in a completely unfair benchmark released by amd. Every other bencmark the pentium M comes out on top, and the Pentium M consumes much loss power. Did i mention you can use DDR2 with it? Looks like AMD is sucking in the mobile market. :confused:
 
What were you expecting? Turion is nothing more than cherry-picked low-voltage desktop A64. P-M is an entirely novel design which was designed from the moment the specs hit paper to be a mobile part. The reality is that Turion would be better compared against the P4-M, since that is a desktop part adapted for mobile use like Turion. Turion is far superior to P4-M in that regard. AMD was stupid to think they could take on an entire novel platform design like Centrino with a low-power desktop part. P-M is really in a class all by itself, and then you add the chipsets (855/915) designed from the ground up for low-power mobile use, and the built-in Wi-Fi, and it's no contest. It wasn't ever a contest to begin with because there has never ever been a decent mobile chipset for A64, just SiS desktop-adapted junk chipsets.

Centrino was destined to destroy Turion even before Turion even was a twinkle in AMD's eye. There's just no competition when (1) Turion isn't a novel mobile-centric part like P-M and (2) AMD refuses to design chipsets and there hasn't ever been a decent lower-power mobile chipset for AMD, ever. Intel just demolished AMD in the mobile space with their ability to design the entire platform, not just the CPU. Plus Intel's CPU is superior for mobile applications too.
 
Sevin7 said:
So im looking into buying a new laptop this summer before i start college. I want a laptop that is a mix between portabliity and power, atleast 3 hours of battery life, and atleast a mobile 6600 (or x700). Now it comes down to cpu, i wanted to wait for the Turion 64, becuase of its low power consumption, 64 bit processing, and possible higher performance than the Pentium M. But after reading many benmarks, it turns out the Turion 64 only beat the Pentium M in a completely unfair benchmark released by amd. Every other bencmark the pentium M comes out on top, and the Pentium M consumes much loss power. Did i mention you can use DDR2 with it? Looks like AMD is sucking in the mobile market. :confused:

The only good thing about T64 is price, and AMD knows it. T64 is only a modified A64, not designed exclusively for mobile like P-M.

However, P-M has a relatively poor FPU (although you probably won't care).

Regarding DDR2...so? The difference in performance between that and DDR is like minimial, if any.
 
Mr. Cornell said:
What were you expecting? Turion is nothing more than cherry-picked low-voltage desktop A64. P-M is an entirely novel design which was designed from the moment the specs hit paper to be a mobile part. The reality is that Turion would be better compared against the P4-M, since that is a desktop part adapted for mobile use like Turion. Turion is far superior to P4-M in that regard. AMD was stupid to think they could take on an entire novel platform design like Centrino with a low-power desktop part. P-M is really in a class all by itself, and then you add the chipsets (855/915) designed from the ground up for low-power mobile use, and the built-in Wi-Fi, and it's no contest. It wasn't ever a contest to begin with because there has never ever been a decent mobile chipset for A64, just SiS desktop-adapted junk chipsets.

Centrino was destined to destroy Turion even before Turion even was a twinkle in AMD's eye. There's just no competition when (1) Turion isn't a novel mobile-centric part like P-M and (2) AMD refuses to design chipsets and there hasn't ever been a decent lower-power mobile chipset for AMD, ever. Intel just demolished AMD in the mobile space with their ability to design the entire platform, not just the CPU. Plus Intel's CPU is superior for mobile applications too.
Actually that is not strictly true - the cherry picked mobiles are the Newarks. The Turions aka Lancasters use more low power transistors from the get go so only Turions are made when they switch to this method. I have seen only one review (gamepc) where the Turion was spanked hard but I have not seen any other comparison reviews.
One other thing - GamePC is a retailer first and foremost not a reviewer. If anyone is not inclined to doubt the accuracy of these results they need their heads examined.
In the Turion v P-M tests if you look at the gaming stats then compare them to their P4EE review which includes the FX55 they have the M770 (2.13Ghz) beating the FX55 (2.6Ghz) in most gaming stats (this was with the P-M using an AGP graphics card and the FX55 a PCI-E) rofl.
Also look at their stats for Halo Combat Evolved in the Turion review it includes a 3200+DTR (2GHz 1Mb of L2 cache) and the P4EE review also has a 3200+ (this time the dual channel version with half the cache). Now you would expect some variation between these two cpus but according to GamePC the single channel scored 74.2 and the dual channel half cache scored 89.7 - over 20% of a difference!
I cant be bothered looking at their other results but I am sure there are more anomalies. Some people pull rabbbits from their hats this review indicates results pulled from their a*s
 
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a64s arent really good for moble cpus. there great if you want alot of gaming performance and dont care for a hot notebook with low battery life. If you dont game much and want a cool notebook to surf the net, get a pentium-m dothan
 
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