Mobile Platform Wars: AMD vs. Intel

Closing Thoughts

At least in the mobile sector, we've got good news and bad news for AMD. We'll start with the bad news first.

While battery life and power requirements look to be reasonably competitive with Intel's offerings, in terms of raw performance AMD gets beat pretty easily. This occurs even when comparing AMD's latest $400 Turion X2 TL-66 to a system using Intel's $250 Core 2 Duo T7300. If you are concerned with mobile CPU performance, AMD is essentially unable to compete at all with Intel's current Core 2 Duo laptops. While you can typically find AMD-based solutions for less money than Intel-based notebooks, features often end up being cut in order to reach a lower price point, and similarly equipped notebooks usually end up favoring AMD by a mere $50. With potentially 25% more performance on tap, we would recommend most spend the extra money to get a Core 2 Duo notebook.

So what's the good news? First, AMD's 65nm process does show improvements over the 90nm process, even if the improvements are relatively minor. The TL-66 does manage to use a bit less power than the TL-60 when both are idle and running at the same 800 MHz clock speed. Given the maturity of the 90nm process and the relative newness of AMD's 65nm process, we expect that AMD can make further improvements that will both increase clock speeds as well as further reduce power requirements. However, it's unlikely that the current Turion X2 will ever be competitive with Core 2 Duo, at least when CPU performance is the criterion used to judge.

Perhaps the more important good news is that AMD's integrated graphics still come out as being superior to Intel's latest offering. The margin has narrowed considerably since the GMA 950 era, and even the past several months have helped Intel a lot in terms of improving performance on the GMA X3100. That being said, the Intel drivers since the launch of the G965/GM965 chipsets (and Q33/Q35/G33) have been more than just a little painful when it comes to running 3D applications. Users have been promised numerous updates, and while compatibility and performance has certainly improved, there's still a lot of work to be done. Let's not even talk about the delays with releasing G35... though perhaps the drivers will finally be ready when those motherboards hit the market. (We can hope, at any rate.)

There's another fringe benefit for AMD when it comes to notebook graphics, of course. As we've shown, both the Radeon X1250 and the GMA X3100 are painfully slow at running 3D graphics when compared to even a relatively inexpensive Radeon Mobility HD 2300. Anyone that needs more GPU performance in their notebook than the current IGPs offer will need to pick up a discrete graphics chip, and that means AMD has a chance at selling one of their mobile GPUs even if they don't provide the CPU or chipset. They'll have to compete with NVIDIA here, but ATI has always had a pretty strong presence in the mobile graphics market.

Looking to the future, we're still waiting to finally see how Phenom actually performs on the desktop, and after that launch we will probably have to wait a few more months before we see the new Griffin mobile architecture. Griffin is based off of K8, so it may not be all that different from current Turion X2 offerings, but we'll have to wait and see. Long-term, we would expect more of the Barcelona technology to make its way into a mobile CPU (assuming Barcelona ends up competing well against Intel), when that might occur is not yet known. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Early indications are that Phenom will be more competitive with Intel's Core 2 Duo/Quad, but we're skeptical that they will actually be able to lead in any benchmarks. Unless Griffin sports some significant changes, we also don't expect it to close the gap in the mobile sector. As usual, time will tell.

While we would definitely prefer a Core 2 Duo notebook over a Turion X2 notebook at this point in time, one of the bigger factors is going to be price and features. The truth is that even though the HP 6515b is clearly slower than the HP dv6500t in our benchmarks, in typical use it would be very difficult for most people to tell the difference. A moderately fast dual-core processor with 2GB of RAM packs more than enough performance for most home and business users. Far more important than the raw performance numbers will be the design and features of the notebook. Laptop bargains come and go, so if you happen to find a good sale on any Core 2 Duo or Turion X2 notebook, outside of gaming performance such a notebook will be more than sufficient.