Replies to post #61484 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[jhalada]

wbmw,

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.

It didn't say idle. It said mostly idle, meaning something was running. That something probably managed to knock Centrion out of its deep sleep states and keep it from returning back. Maybe Turion is faster at switching to lower power states, which could be what allowed it to beat Centrino on that Battery life test. At least that would be my hypothesis.

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.

That's certainly a lot less convincing then all of your previous posts that were outright dismissive of Turion. Let me see:

TURDION is a low volume mobile "Hail Mary" pass that AMD is using to hopefully increase their mobile market share from 5% all the way up to 10%. It will probably succeed at this, but AMD doesn't have what it takes to put mobile power budgets into high volume products.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=6760611

Meanwhile, AMD has the underwhelming TURION CPU for the mobile space, which in spite of its heavy marketing push simply can't compete in the same performance and power envelope as Dothan, let alone Yonah.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=6684387

I think an optimally configured Centrino will smoke a TURION laptop with equal specs.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=6716348

Joe

[mmoy]

There are many environments where you don't have a laptop that
is completely off. If you're on a wireless network using a VPN,
you almost always have some network traffic on your system.

Email programs, browsers and other little programs that wake up,
take a look around and then become dormant again can keep a
system awake.

In my performance testing, I have to go around and shoot all of
the background processes to get consistent results and getting
a Windows machine to be quiet can be difficult with all of those
background services running.

On Cool n Quiet, it does drop the processor speed quite quickly.
This generally isn't noticeable with applications but it is very
noticeable on benchmarks and can result in benchmarks taking two to three times longer.

I think that the ability to underclock your notebook to 400 Mhz is worth something in terms of battery life.

One other thing is that I would rather get a system with a decent video card and that seems to be a big battery killer. I had a look at HP's business AMD notebooks and the deal-killer for me was the shared-ram video. It looks like many vendors are putting in low-power video for Turion notebooks.

For me, I'm almost always with a power cord so battery life is not a big deal. Crunching builds and compile times are.