Question about Intel Core Duo and AMD Turion processors

I've been looking at HP and Compaq laptops and I've seen the choice between the Intel core duo and AMD Turion 64-bit processors. I don't know much about this, and I'm wondering whether one is better than the other.

Also I'm wondering if the 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory with the Compaq V5000Z would be okay for some lower-end games and Windows Vista.

 

Im not sure if your refering to turion x2 or not but basically the difference is ones made by AMD and one is made by Intel, both have good and bad features but in the end it up to personal choice, If its a single core Turion go with a core duo you will see a much better performance boost from a dual core with the intel than you will with the single core 64 bit tutrion. The x200 is more than enough to handle vista and basic games.

 

Turion's will be cheaper than Duo's for the same amount of computing power, but the Duo's should provide better battery life for a Turion of equal power.

 

matt_h1 it's not X2, it says this on the customize page: AMD Turion(TM) 64 ML-34 (1.8GHz/1MB L2 Cache)

Is the Intel core duo have significantly better battery life than the Turion? Other than that they are basically equal?

 

Well chip wise they both use about the same but the turion dont have very well designed chipsets like the intel one does so you will notice a slight hit in battery life, the core duo your getting 2 cpu's on one die but with the turion your only getting one, In single threaded tasks they say you get about a ~20% increase in speed while in multithreaded you will get ~50%.

 

The turion is a 64bit processor which means it can process 2 32bit lines of code at once, the same that a dual core processor can.

Because of that I don't think you can really use that to put the Duo ahead of the Turion.

However the Duo's run at 21w, the MT Turion's is 25w and the ML 35w

 

A line of code is a line of code, regardless of whether it's 32 or 64 bit... The only time you'll see a significant performance improvement is with SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) commands, used in media encoding/decoding among other things. In other words, a 64bit single core is NOT the same as two 32bit cores.

For multitasking or multi-threaded apps, the Core Duo owns the Turion.

 

Documentation please.

While I agree to this in certain terms, another thing to take into consideration though is the what the price difference between the two allows you as far as clock speed goes.

 

In regards to multi-tasking, this is more of a subjective thing since very few current benchmarks run several apps concurrently. I can only suggest reading any of the reviews for Core Duo based models here at NBR. Almost unanimously, everyone has explicitly commented on how fast the machine felt, even while ripping DVDs, running virus scans, etc.

I can offer this review over at xtreview.com for the new Turion X2 vs. Core Duo. Unusually, they've managed to find two competing machines that have very similar specs aside from CPU... for this they should be commended. For comparisons sake, they've also tested against a Centrino and a Turion ML based notebook. Take specific note of the 3DSMax7 benchmarks, as this seems to be the only multithreaded app they've benchmarked with.

 

Thank you much for the link. I found it to be very informative. +1

This may very well push me towards the Z96J over the MS 1039

 

well, if it was a 64 bit single core using hyperthreading, it could do 2 instructions in parallel by emulating a dual core environment. this, however, has nothing to do with it being 64 bit of course, and requires 2 separate threads. and a true dual core is faster than an emulated dual core.