Turion beats Dothan

[Sjaak]

Interesting... looks from review #2 (at a glance) that turion uses a bit more power at idle and quite a bit more at load.

Also the Turion gets beaten for gaming whereas the Dothan gets beaten at multimedia! Unlike the typical P4>A64 for encoding and A64>P4 for gaming....

Indeed, quite the other way around. And i like it

 

[David]

Note:

The Laptop Logic review uses the ML processor. The GamePC one uses the MT processor. Thus they may get different results.... the MT is the lower power usage chip.

 

[Bar81]

I have to agree with the above posters that AMD not having its own chipset is a huge strike against them. As has been simply put, third party chipsets have never performed as well as first party chipsets from Intel and AMD, both in stability and performance. It's a major reason I'll be going the P-M route this month as nvidia makes nothing but crap, like VIA. If you think nForce 2, 3, and 4 somehow compare to current Intel core logic solutions then you really have a strange criteria when making the comparison. Bottom line is that Intel core logic is better in every way than any third party core logic on the Intel or AMD side and until AMD changes that Intel will continue to dominate the market in both the desktop and particularly notebook arenas.

 

[DragoXT]

have to agree with the above posters that AMD not having its own chipset is a huge strike against them. As has been simply put, third party chipsets have never performed as well as first party chipsets from Intel and AMD, both in stability and performance.

Granted that is true, but you have to understand that Intel is a huge company and has the resourses to make its own chipsets and cpus. AMD on the otherhand is a small company haveing only 1 fab plan that makes all their cpus. You are comparing apples and oranges here. AMD doesnt have the funds to create their own chipset, or they just dont have the R&D time to do it. When you have a company like Intel that has been the king in the cpu area to a company that is trying to make some money in intels market to stay alive, what is more important? MONEY. If AMD had the ability to make their own chipsets that would be cost effective, they would, but obviously it isnt otherwise we would see AMD chipsets.

 

[Quailane]

AMD hasn't had a chipset since the 761, which people absolutely loved and was the best performing chipset for the platform.

Folks, try not to turn this into another "ur a fanboi no ur a fanboi shut up" flamewar.

Dude, you are seriously wrong. The amd 761 chipset sucks completely. Higher benchmark scores across the board using VIA contemporary chipsets. I have a motherboard with amd 761 northbridge and have had some in the past with kt266. One thing I remember is that benchmark scores in my stepdad's AMD 761 northbridge were completely trounced by switching all the components into a shuttle nf2, running all things at stock. I don't know how you can say that anything that uses a third party chipset is less stable than anything else. I have had a lot of experience using all kinds of AMD motherboards, from socket7 to socket 939 and everything in-between (ok, not slot A or 940 though). I have never seen a chipset that was inherently unstable. It has only been specific boards/manufacturers that are really crappy. Yes, I have had problems with some 3rd party chipsets, but in one motherboard it was crappy, while in the other motherboards with it they run flawlessly. How do you guys measure something as more or less stable? Most problems are user error/overclocking too much or crappy motherboard, not chipset.

Look at this: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/kt266aviaapollo/

Can anyone show me one shred of hard evidence stating or supporting that any 3rd party chipset on AMD side gets crushed by any amd or intel chipset?

You know what? The SIS athlon 64 chipset IS the AMD core logic. SIS bought it from AMD to produce as their own chipset. I don't see ANYBODY running around saying SIS athlon64 chipsets are better than nforce4.

I seriously don't know where any of you are coming from about these third party chipsets. I will agree and believe that intel chipsets are better than the third party chipsets FOR THE INTEL PLATFORM. As far as any AMD platform goes, it is simply not so.

 

[johan851]

I have a motherboard with amd 761 northbridge and have had some in the past with kt266. One thing I remember is that benchmark scores in my stepdad's AMD 761 northbridge were completely trounced by switching all the components into a shuttle nf2, running all things at stock

Of course, the nforce2 is a good two years older...it also had a multitude of corrupt BIOS issues. Still, all of this is a tangent, and we should leave it out of this thread.

Sorry folks!

 

[Bar81]

I don't see ANYBODY running around saying SIS athlon64 chipsets are better than nforce4.

Well, I am. The best chipsets on the AMD side atm are undoubtedly SiS produced, nvidia core logic is garbage between the never fixed on any platform IDE drivers, NCQ corruption issues, brutally high Ge CPU usage, and non-working "hardware" firewall. The only problem with SiS is no one produces good high end boards on the chipsets and I'm not sure they've properly figured out how to support optical SATA devices but the last time I tried is on the ASRock K8S8X I had almost a year ago.

 

[rseven]

Indigestion is the better part of valor.

 

[Super Nade]

Folks,

Please keep this on topic. Let us thrash out the technical aspects of the interesting article, presented for discussion. The business aspect was discussed ad nausem in rseven's earlier thread.

/*Drags this back on topic*/

For those of you interested, here is some information I gathered, about the Dothan:

-TDP = 21 W when compared to a TDP of 24 W for the 130nm P-M's.

-Addition of an Enhanced Register Access Manager and an Enhanced Data Prefetcher. Intel claim that this uses less power when switching between 32 bit, 16 bit and 8 bit modes.

-A big improvement in their Speed Step technology, which is a throttling measure to save battery life. Although this is nothing new per-se, there could be extra hidden bits which put it almost close to complete shutdown (speculation only).

Don't be surprised if a Dothan varient lands in a Mac. With the recent burning out of G5's (the IBM's are running super hot, close to 75C), Apple sorely need a cold turkey chip.

 

[hafa]

One other area where the Turion is beginning to compete with the Centrino (at least in this part of the world) is in ultra-slim and light laptops. The Atec 195e uses the Turion 3000+ chip and weighs in at only 1.95kg. I picked one of these up in Bangkok back in July and found that it could run on battery for 3 hours of constant use while running Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Granted that this is mostly apocryphal, but I've found the Turion-based 195e to compete favourably with several Centrino-based Toshibas which I've bought over the past month in terms of battery life and overall performance.

The Atec machines are quite well-made and very low priced (36,000 Bhat = US$876). Compare this to at least $US1600 for similar size, weight and performance for a Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony, HP, etc...

My experience agrees with the assertions made in the article referenced by dvandervelde; Turion-based laptops can provide superior value. Now we just need some importers to contact Atec to bring these to the masses of road warriors...

 

[Zulu-1]

wow... does anyone know when these chips will be availible to buy? i want to put one in my rig... this is newark right people?... these things should OC like crazy

 

[Quailane]

wow... does anyone know when these chips will be availible to buy? i want to put one in my rig... this is newark right people?... these things should OC like crazy

Newark or Oakville?

 

[CCUABIDExORxDIE]

that is not newark. it is lancaster, which is what a turion is. turions arent oc champs. oakvilles arent either really. newark is the chip of choice

 

[Lionsault_100]

I think this is comparing apples and oranges. i have a laptop for mobility, so long battery life, seemless webbrowsing, built in wifi etc. I have a desktop for power.

Turion is a power chip, with weak mobility solutions. dothan is a mobility chip that packs a mean power punch., there is no comparison here.

however, people bringing these 2 chips to the desktop, it'd probably be turion all the way.

 

[diggingforgold]

Comparison? Yes, they are different breeds. But in real world conditions, the battery life on both chips is about equal- with Dothan having an advantage on heaviest load, and Turion having an advantage on lightest load.

If AMD would only build their mobile line from the ground up, I think they will totally destroy their competition in the mobile market.

 

[hafa]

I think this is comparing apples and oranges. i have a laptop for mobility, so long battery life, seemless webbrowsing, built in wifi etc. I have a desktop for power.

Turion is a power chip, with weak mobility solutions. dothan is a mobility chip that packs a mean power punch., there is no comparison here.

however, people bringing these 2 chips to the desktop, it'd probably be turion all the way.

I'd say that it's very much apples-to-apples. Read the article and my last post. I have two laptops; one is a desktop replacement with a 16" screen weighing in at 5 kilos that I use for local meetings and demonstrations, the other a ultra-light and thin unit weighing 1.95 kilos which I use for work when I travel to other countires. Different laptops for different purposes. The article compares performance and battery life. My post considers weight, size and cost. These are all valid criteria when comparing laptops.

 

[techun]

that is not newark. it is lancaster, which is what a turion is. turions arent oc champs. oakvilles arent either really. newark is the chip of choice

lancaster is my home town..

 

[hafa]

Tom's Hardware Guide (yeah, I know, revile them, despise them) actually posted a fairly decent article about the Turion last week. It details the Turion platform fairly well and is a nice adjunct to the article posted by dvandervelde.

 

[Quailane]

lancaster is my home town..

Newark is mine.

Is there any performance comparison using overclocked laptops of Turion and Dothan.

Actually, isn't Turion the brand name? What is the core called. I have seen stickers like the athlon64 stickers saying Turion64.

 

[CCUABIDExORxDIE]

turion is the brand name. lancaster is the core name. i think i said that before, but wasnt too clear.