Replies to post #61477 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mmoy]

> A bit surprising, if you asked me, but what do I know. I
> hate notebooks.

I love notebooks for their portability. And the one that I have packs a pretty good punch as it can smoke all of the desktops at work. Of course I wouldn't mind one of those VoodooPC servers masquerading as notebooks either.

[wbmw]

Re: A bit surprising, if you asked me, but what do I know. I hate notebooks. But you are raving about notebooks practically non-stop, and if there is no substantial flaw in the review, it looks like your analysis could not be have been more off base.

This is what the article said about performance:

Although the Pentium M lost most of the benchmarks, it trailed behind by a mere 5% or less most of the time. Its efficient architecture means that even when performing the most strenuous tasks, battery life is guaranteed to be long.

Interesting that it trailed behind by less than 5% most of the time, especially since they had to use a software hack to get the Turion system to recognize DDR-400 memory.

DDR400 is supposed to be standard for Turion laptops, although many manufacturers prefer to use DDR333 RAM instead. At default, the Ferrari recognized our OCZ DDR400 RAM as DDR333. This was easily changed by changing the MEMCLK Frequency to 200 using A64 Tweaker

Let's hope that the rest of the world's consumers are smart enough to do this; otherwise, Dothan will be covering that 5% performance differential pretty easily.

As for battery life, I suspect an issue with the configuration. Every other Centrino battery life I've ever seen has a substantial battery life difference when running under load vs. under idle. Yet this review shows Centrino with 2:32 hrs under loaded conditions and 2:51 hrs under idle.

That does not make sense. Either the power management settings were not set right, causing a lot of battery life to be left on the table, or the article author made an error transcribing the data to the graphs. Given that Dothan also has 1 or 2 deeper sleep states than Turion, I would expect Dothan to be even more advantaged in the idle case, regardless of what this article suggests.

So in summary, it looks like what I expected for some time now. Dothan offers close to the performance of Turion, less than 5% differential, which can be made up by the fact that most vendors are using DDR333 timings for their Turion notebooks. And in terms of battery life, the results are inconclusive, but I still believe for the lowest power and longest battery life, Centrino still can't be beat.