Mobile Platform Wars: AMD vs. Intel

Introduction

AMD has fallen on some hard times, dating back to the launch of Intel's Core 2 lineup in the fall of 2006. Many enthusiasts have been feeling quite anxious, holding out hope that Barcelona would mark the return of yesterday's AMD, where the K8 architecture basically scored a knockout punch for the underdog, but the chances of that occurring are becoming increasingly unlikely. At least in terms of raw performance, Intel has a roadmap in place that should keep the heavyweight belt firmly in their grasp. However, as many people are ready to point out, performance isn't everything. Is there some truth to that statement, or is it a convenient phrase that merely serves as an excuse? That's what we're here to find out.

It's no secret that the mobile PC market trails the desktop and server markets quite a bit in terms of computational power. Quad-core desktop systems are becoming increasingly common, and octal-core workstations and servers are more affordable than ever before. Bounce back to the mobile market and you will find plenty of dual-core offerings, but only at lower clock speeds. Laptops also come with slower memory, hard drives (with the exception of the new solid-state models), graphics chips, and system buses. Not surprisingly, for about $1500 you can build a high-quality desktop system that is capable of outperforming even the fastest notebook currently on the market. On the other hand, you can't easily take such a system on the road with you - and you certainly can't use it in an airplane or car. And if you want to talk about performance per watt, many notebooks are able to offer competitive performance to desktop systems that consume two or three times as much power.

In fact, compared to one year ago, about the only significant changes to the desktop performance landscape are the addition of quad-core CPUs and extreme performance graphics chips, neither of which are really necessary for a large number of computer users. Businesses in particular don't require such amenities, as they are rarely running their computers at full load and they don't tend to run a lot of 3D applications (aka "games"). Adding higher performance parts to such an environment would simply increase energy usage without necessarily increasing productivity. Throw in the mobility factor of notebooks, and there are a lot of businesses that are getting away from traditional desktops and moving towards using laptops for most of their employees. (There are exceptions of course, so we are speaking about typical businesses - game developers, 3D animation studios, and other high-performance computing companies can and do continue to use desktops and workstations.)

A couple months ago, AMD quietly launched their newest update to their mobile Turion X2 processor line. The latest addition is the TL-66, which increases the maximum clock speed to 2.3GHz, an admittedly small bump in performance relative to the TL-64 that runs at 2.2GHz. However, the TL-66 also holds the distinction of being one of the first 65nm Turion X2 parts to hit the market. The Brisbane core was AMD's first 65nm part, and while that part wasn't much faster than the previous 90nm offerings it did lower power requirements somewhat. With a more mature 65nm process, it certainly makes sense for AMD to migrate their mobile CPU production to the new fabrication facilities. We've got HP's 6515b business laptop in-house for testing, equipped with both a TL-60 and a TL-66 processor, so we will be able to see exactly what has changed (if anything) with AMD's new mobile CPU.

Naturally, we also want to look at how AMD's fastest Turion X2 compares to Intel's latest Core 2 Duo laptop processors. As we want to keep the system configurations as similar as possible, we will be focusing on performance compared to HP's dv6500t, which is based off of Intel's Santa Rosa platform. It's also noteworthy that both of these notebooks use integrated graphics, so we will also take a moment to look at the current state of IGPs. These are not strictly apples-to-apples comparisons, but by the time we're through with the benchmarks we should have a fair idea of how the two mobile platforms currently compare to each other.