Mobile Platform Wars: AMD vs. Intel

AMD vs. Intel

We have no doubts that the Intel system will be faster in overall performance. The question is how much faster? Also note that while the TL-60 is priced similarly to the T7300, the same cannot be said for the TL-66. In fact, not even Intel's fastest mobile Core 2 Duo - the 2.4GHz T7700 - costs as much as the TL-66. Since we only had the T7300 on hand, however, we will stick with that as our baseline comparison.

Performance Comparison
	HP dv6500t T7300	HP 6515b TL-60	HP 6515b TL-66	T7300 vs. TL66	T7300 vs. TL60
DivX 6.6.1 (FPS)	7.34	5.10	5.71	28.6%	43.9%
QT 7.2 H.264 (FPS)	43.07	31.82	34.41	25.1%	35.3%
WME9 (FPS)	38.73	32.10	37.11	4.3%	20.7%
iTunes 7.4.2 MP3 (MB/s)	6.76	4.90	5.58	21.1%	37.8%
Cinebench R10	3870	3189	3556	8.8%	21.4%
SYSmark 2007 Overall	87.25	75.25	80.25	8.7%	15.9%
SYSmark 2007 E-Learning	91	77	82	11.0%	18.2%
SYSmark 2007 Video Creation	79	71	75	5.3%	11.3%
SYSmark 2007 Productivity	79	69	71	11.3%	14.5%
SYSmark 2007 3D	100	84	93	7.5%	19.0%
MobileMark 2007 Productivity Performance	183	125	140	30.7%	46.4%
MobileMark 2007 Productivity Battery	155	156	156	-0.6%	-0.6%
MobileMark 2007 DVD Battery	124	127	131	-5.3%	-2.4%
Average Performance Difference				14.8%	25.8%

Performance wise, things are unfortunately not very close for AMD. The T7300 is an average of 26% faster than the TL-60 and 15% faster than the TL-66. Battery life does seem to favor the AMD platform a very small amount, but considering the different display size plus the fact that the 6515b battery has 17% more capacity, and we would tend to say Intel wins here as well. Power requirements at load definitely continue to favor Intel, as we'll see later.

We expected Intel to win the performance comparison, but the margin of victory was a bit larger than we anticipated. Realistically, AMD is going to have to compete on price in order to attract buyers, but in order to get the price down where it really needs to be (about 15% lower with the TL-66 and 25% lower with the TL-60 if we go by performance differences) they would almost need to sell the processor at a loss. It's not that the AMD Turion X2 processors are "too slow" but rather that you should be able to get faster performance from Intel for roughly the same price. If you can find a good deal on an AMD laptop, we feel that the HP 6515b is still more than fast enough for typical use, but if what you depend on is processor performance Intel wins this round quite easily.

The other option of course is to come out with a new product in the mobile space, and AMD will almost certainly do that with the Barcelona architecture at some point. How soon that will occur and whether it will be enough to make them competitive on the mobile landscape remains to be seen.

Of course, the above statements are focused primarily on the CPU, and depending on what sort of application you're running that might not be as important as other features. In most areas, modern laptops are pretty much equivalent. They all come with wireless networking (many with draft 802.11n now), DVD playback and recording, and the ability to run Windows Vista with the Aero Glass user interface. The vast majority of laptops also come with integrated graphics, however, and that's one area where AMD might be able to come out ahead of Intel. Let's find out....