AMD Turion

[Zouxi]

Greetings,

I want to buy a laptop, and i noticed that there are two kinds of processors: Intel and AMD Turion. And usually the AMD Turion are by far less expensive.

WHy they are less expensive than intel, and do you advise me to buy a laptop with AMD processor??

Thank you.

[Lallous]

If you want to get a Turion, get at least the Turion 64 X2 model (The TL series), they could be compared to the lowest end of core 2 duo processors of Intel. The TL-64 is compared to the T5500 which is a decent processor to have if you intend to keep this laptop for a few years.

Also make sure you get a minimum 2 GB of ram. 3 GB would be perfect because it comes 1X2 GB + 1X1 GB, so you could expand up to 4 GB easilier later on.

[suomynona]

Originally Posted by Zouxi

Greetings,

I want to buy a laptop, and i noticed that there are two kinds of processors: Intel and AMD Turion. And usually the AMD Turion are by far less expensive.

WHy they are less expensive than intel, and do you advise me to buy a laptop with AMD processor??

Thank you.

Practically, there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between and AMD processor and an Intel processor in terms of what they do - 100% the same functionality for you as a user.

Sometimes, one uses slightly less power than the other, which is good for battery life. But the processor is a very small part of the system for power consumption (screen, memory, chipset, ...). The good news is that the Turion brand is the low power version of the Athlon processor. So it's good for battery life and with good performance.

If it's cheaper, than it's definitely an excellent deal for you. Go for it. I have an AMD Turion64 X2 HP laptop and I use it for engineering stuff. It's very good.

The reason the Turion is cheaper is probably because it was released a year before Intel CPU for the laptop you're talking about. Also there was a price war between Intel and AMD to gain market share and a year or two back, AMD cut significantly their prices to sell more volume.

[Evolution]

Originally Posted by Zouxi

WHy they are less expensive than intel, and do you advise me to buy a laptop with AMD processor??

Because they are slower

The top-end AMD trurion can only compete with Intel low-end processors

[suomynona]

The Core2 Intel CPUs are faster than AMD's. Core2 is a newer architecture.

The way CPU performance is often measured is by using advanced benchmarks (test programs) that have often little to do with real life applications (it's like determining the max speed capability of the CPU). Which is truly not what most people care about.

Here's a comparative example, imagine you have two identically looking BMWs but one can do 250 kms/hr while the other can only do 200 km/hr, with the 200 being significantly cheaper. The 250 km/h one might also accelerate a bit faster. Would you go for the 250 or 200? It really depends on what you want to do.

If you mainly do web browsing, email, microsoft office apps.... i.e. typical everyday uses of a computer, then I think a few seconds at boot time vs the cost difference may not matter. If you run complex applications that constantly saturate the CPU (The fan goes on all the time), then Intel will give you better performance for most applications.

It's a tradeoff :-).

Don't forget to not only use the CPU brand to decide on the laptop !
Other factors are:
1. RAM (memory): The higher the better, especially with VISTA!
2. Hard Disk space
3. DVD/Bluray reader/burner
4. Screen size
5. Battery life
6. Aesthetics
7. ...

Good luck.

[GeaGea SkyWalkeR]

How good are the AMD Barcelona Quad Cores'.


So far, we the company had claimed that Barcelona will surpass the performance of Clovertown by about 40% at any given clock speed. Now the company says that it believes that Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance “over the competition’s highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency.”

TG Daily - AMD: Barcelona quad-core 50% faster than Intel’s quad-core Xeon

Anyone used them,

[Evolution]

And the article you posted is very old and it was just rumor. At same clock speed, intel quad cores are faster, just try to search for modern benchmarks.

And Barcelona is a server processor anyway, you should compare Intel core 2 quad with AMD Phenom

[freedom4ever]

Intel CPU's are better less heat and faster clock rate, in laptops

but desktops idd go for AMD sheaper and more effective heat dissipation is more efficient with water cooling and ASUS boards are awsomeeeeee they give you crazy performance compared to intel