AMD Turion vs. Pentium-M

[Altcon]

What's the difference between them?
What's considered an overall better platform for notebooks and why?
I've been searching for reviews about mobile AMD Cpu's but haven't been able to find any.
Any input apreciated.

 

[Pete]

GamePC compared 'em. Click on 'In the Labs.' I believe the P-M is still the battery-life king, and it's no slouch in terms of performance. You certainly pay for it, though.

 

[Fox5]

Basically the Turion is cheaper and has less performance.(per mhz and overall since it doesn't clock as high)

P-M also has a much better selection of laptops, Turion laptops are pretty much limited to low end and special edition(like Acer Ferrari), good competition to the Celeron Ms though, I think they have about the same price, better performance, and better battery life since the Celerons lack power management.

 

[Sxotty]

Basically the Turion is cheaper and has less performance.(per mhz and overall since it doesn't clock as high)
P-M also has a much better selection of laptops, Turion laptops are pretty much limited to low end and special edition(like Acer Ferrari), good competition to the Celeron Ms though, I think they have about the same price, better performance, and better battery life since the Celerons lack power management.

That is basically true, but I do not think it is accurate.

I believe a lot of the problem is that Turions are put in budget machines that do not have as frugal of power management (for example in the chipsets) and so forth to begin with. As was said previously it depends on the ML or MT version as well. I think that for example the fuji lifebook with a turion could be a killer compared to many pentium M notebooks. The problem is that there are no good reviews.

The only thing in your post that is incorrect is that they are "good competition to celeron Ms" that is not true they slaughter a Celeron M there is no competition at all.

 

[mczak]

Basically the Turion is cheaper and has less performance.(per mhz and overall since it doesn't clock as high)

I wouldn't say the Turion has less performance per Mhz - depends a bit what you do, it has a faster fpu, and overall the per-Mhz performance seems quite comparable. Also, you may get some performance improvement by using a 64bit OS - good luck with that on the P-M.
If you compare the P-M to the Turion MT (which is probably a good idea as the ML uses more power) then you're correct, you can get faster P-M (2.26Ghz vs. 1.8Ghz), though the fastest Turion ML clocks up just as high (2.2Ghz). (You WILL pay more for that 2.26Ghz P-M though compared to the 1.8Ghz Turion MT.)

P-M also has a much better selection of laptops, Turion laptops are pretty much limited to low end and special edition(like Acer Ferrari), good competition to the Celeron Ms though, I think they have about the same price, better performance, and better battery life since the Celerons lack power management.

That is unfortunately true. For the lowest power consumption, you want a P-M. It is, however, unclear if that is really because the cpu uses less power or just because the chipset is better suited for notebooks (or a combination of both). Celeron M is a bit a strange beast, its performance isn't too bad (the smaller cache doesn't hurt too much), price is good too, but IMHO with its lack of power management it really isn't a cpu for a notebook - would be a good choice for a low-noise desktop pc (since when running full-tilt it doesn't use more power than a P-M, only when there is not much to do it uses more power), but we all know how heavily intel markets this thing as a desktop P4 alternative .

 

[Altcon]

second swing

So from all of your posts I'm gathering it's a good alternative to a celeron (Centrino?) based notebook, but can't really match Pentium M chips (to my understanding thus far that means Dothan,right?).
So to make it a little more clear cut (for me), if I had a choice between a full featured Celeron based notebook or a Turion one based on the same features, I should take the Turion.
I'm looking for a notebook mainly for surfing, email,music and office apps (mostly writing papers nothing fancy)-the Turion will handle those with more grace than a centrino?
In terms of companies, HP, Acer, IBM, Dell-which are a big mistake and which are recommended?

 

[Fox5]

Centrion is laptops that use Intel's wireless, chipset, and Pentium M cpu. Celeron M based laptops are not centrino.

Anyhow, if you can find a Turion notebook that offers what you want go for it.

 

[Mariner]

Centrino is the brand name for the whole Pentium M/Chipset caboodle with integrated wireless and other stuff. Celeron M is basically a Pentium M with cut down cache and without the same power-saving features. Dothan is the much improved 90nm Pentium M with 2MB cache (Banias was the 130nm original with 1MB cache). Some Celeron Ms are based on the old Banias with a mere 512KB cache so if you decide to go Celeron M, make sure it is one of the newer Dothan based ones which have 1MB cache and as 90nm chips use less power. The Dothan based Celeron Ms are better than the original Banias Pentium Ms.

Turion is a good low-power chip but there aren't really any specialist integrated chipsets in the way that Centrino is. Therefore, the processor itself is good (and 64-bit compatible) but for laptops the overall power consumption of CPU+chipset isn't quite as good. Still pretty decent, however.

The main thing to ensure is that you don't end up with a Celeron (non-M) based laptop as the performance of these is crappy in comparison to either Turion, Pentium M or Celeron M. Make sure you get a laptop using one of these three as all should be more than adequate for your needs. I'd say that the quality of the screen and keyboard are more important than which of these chips is included in the laptop.