Question regarding AMD based notebooks

Hi

I have now owned an AMD based notebook for 6 months (Athlon x2 2.20GHz)
and I can honestly say I've had no problems.

This brings me to my next question.. I never see AMD based notebooks.. I go to a store and I see maybe one or two Acer's with them in but nothing else.

Are AMD unreliable in notebooks or something? I've spent a long time googling everything about this topic and it seems most AMD users stick to Desktops.

 

Nope AMD is fine in laptops and there are actually alot of them out. just lately HP and Dell have not been making many. other than they normally are a tad warmer and a bit lower on battery life they are a great machine. they also tend to have FASTER GPU's then that pesky Intel IGP

 

Could you expect an AMD based laptop to fufill a 3-5 year lifespan with appropriate care?

 

AMD had a bit of an issue with over-heating in laptops (something which seems to have been tempered down with the generation currently on the market) and it's possible that left a bit of a sour taste in people's mouth... or the 'lack' of their availability on the market might be more attributed due to Intel's core i and SB versions (you have to admit that Intel IS a larger company plus has better PR).

However, AMD seems to have a higher prevalence in laptops as of late with their gpu's.
Their discrete solutions are better than Nvidia offerings (as far as price/performance ratio goes), and pairing them up with Intel's cpu's seems like a very good option (plus it balances out the price as well - depending on how the manufacturer decides to price it and extort as much $ as possible from the consumer).

 

The recent ones, probably (though nobody knows for sure, there can always be some long-term flaw or something). The old AMD notebooks ran hot and the motherboards typically couldn't handle it over years, but now they've more or less fixed it.

The reason you don't see many of them is that the Intel's laptop CPUs are a lot more powerful than anything AMD makes and Intel laptops also get better battery life. The only reason to buy an AMD-based notebook for at least the past 5 years has been that they're cheap. This has changed somewhat this year with the release of the Bobcat-based CPUs which are much faster than Intel Atom at close to the same price tag. AMD is also releasing Llano CPUs for which they're promising high integrated GPU performance and long battery life. It should be released in a week or so and you'll probably see more AMD notebooks after that.

 

Well in the six months I've owned the laptop, I've done regular temperature checks and the core temp stays around 50oc, it never exceeds 55oc regardless of time on or what I'm doing.

The fans are on fairly consistently but they're quiet.

 

Previous generation AMD processors were known to run a bit hot and consume a lot more power than their Intel counterparts. I think that idea is still stuck in many people's heads, which is why they avoid them.

It isn't true anymore, however. Danube-based notebooks had basically the same battery life as Arrandale ones and, generally speaking, better heat management. Problem is they were still significantly weaker. Even in heavily multi-threaded applications, the fastest Danube quad-core barely kept up with the fastest dual-core i5 Arrandales. In lightly-threaded apps, it wasn't even close.

Having said that, the real-world difference is barely noticeable and 85% or more of users would never notice a difference. Power users still definitely want to buy Intel, but for most people AMD is fine and usually cheaper. Their new platform, Llano, comes out in a couple of weeks and if they deliver on the battery life they claim you should start seeing more AMD notebooks out there.

 

AMD's thermals and heat management has always been inferior to Intel but that doesn't make them any less reliable. As long as you take proper care of your machine, it shouldn't have any shorter life span than an Intel based notebook.

 

That's very true. I have an overheating AMD Athlon 3200+(socket 754) that has been running just fine since 2004 and is still going strong. It does generate a lot more heat than usual. I have an HP V5000Z with AMD Sempron 3300 since 2006. Its heat management is actually quite okay while not as cool as some Intel CPUs. The V5000Z could probably last for another 3 years at least though bad blocks are growing on the HDD. I think AMD is a very viable alternative for most users.

I bought two I7 desktops because I needed them as home servers to run test scenarios that require 12-24GB ram. All of my home laptops have AMD processors.