Quote:Original post by Promit
It will work fine in 32 bit everything. 64 bit is an option, not a requirement, and nearly everything will work fine on an Athlon64 just like it was a normal, non-64 bit CPU.

Skip the "nearly" part.
It's 100% compatible, period. [wink]

Anyway, if you want the best mobile CPU, I'd personally suggest a Pentium M. Great performance, and ver low power consumption/heat dissipation.

The Athlon 64 is a better performer, but more power hungry as well. It's generally considered the best desktop CPU, so it depends on what you want from your laptop. If battery life is a concern, a Pentium M is a better choice. If you just want the best performance, an Athlon 64 is a great choice.

Pentium 4 just sucks. [wink]

A Pentium 4 dissipates 110W or so (depending on speed). Athlon 64 runs less than 70W at full load. (I believe it goes down to 30 or so when idling).
A Pentium M is down in the 20's, I think. (Keep in mind though, AMD measure TDP as the absolute max possible heat dissipation. Intel measures it as "the most heat dissipated during normal operation", with the max being about 15% higher)

So no, an Athlon 64 won't be a problem in a laptop. It'll just drain the battery a bit faster than a Pentium M.

Quote:Original post by Spoonbender
Athlon 64 runs less than 70W at full load. (I believe it goes down to 30 or so when idling).
A Pentium M is down in the 20's, I think. (Keep in mind though, AMD measure TDP as the absolute max possible heat dissipation. Intel measures it as "the most heat dissipated during normal operation", with the max being about 15% higher)

I actually had this discussion last week with a coleague.

According to Intel documentation (page 74), a standard Intel Pentium 4 ("standard" meaning not "Extreme Edition" or "64-bit") will dissipate 84W at 3.2GHz and 115W at 3.4+GHz. They do make a note on their table that this is NOT the maximum operating temperature.

Intel Pentium-M chips will dissipate 15-27W of power, depending on model.. though it should be noted that the Pentium-M is really just a modified P3.

AMD's documentation specifies that all Athlon 64 chips 3000-4000 will dissipate 89W max and 22W minimum. Even the FX processors run cooler, 25W-105W.
Semprons are in the range of 20W-70W.
I wasn't able to find any TDP specs for the mobile AMD chips..

I'm a rabid AMD fanboy... I can't think of anything Intel has done right in the past year.. their "64-bit" support has all the features of a 'quick hack' IMHO. And the way they're implementing dual-core chips smacks of lazyness. AMD has been creating superior hardware for a long time now. (again.. IMHO)

And then there's the whole Intel Anti-trust suit AMD filed, regarding Intel's questionable marketing techniques

Oh, and I've had a 3500+ for around 7 months now, and I love it.

Quote:Original post by pragma Fury
I'm a rabid AMD fanboy... I can't think of anything Intel has done right in the past year.. their "64-bit" support has all the features of a 'quick hack' IMHO. And the way they're implementing dual-core chips smacks of lazyness. AMD has been creating superior hardware for a long time now. (again.. IMHO)

Not lazyness, just "being caught off-guard"-ness. [wink]
Anyway, the Pentium M is nice, although technically it is older than the "past year" you're looking at. But it's still being used, so I think it's fair to count that one success... Other than that though, I agree.
(And then again, actually managing to do as well as they do with a hopelessly crippled architecture is an impressive feat too. You have to respect them simply for taking such an insane, unbalanced architecture and make it perform *almost* comparable to an Athlon 64. Yes, it's a backward kind of logic, but still. I respect the Intel engineers, even if they're occasionally given crazy orders from their bosses)

Quote:have to respect them simply for taking such an insane, unbalanced architecture and make it perform *almost* comparable to an Athlon 64. Yes, it's a backward kind of logic, but still. I respect the Intel engineers, even if they're occasionally given crazy orders from their bosses)

Intel's 'solution' for trying to keep up with AMD is a complete brute-force approach... Increase clock speed, give it more L2 cache, label it as "Extreme Edition" and jack up the price by $500.

If I were them, I'd seriously look at rearchitecting their chip.. especially with all the hype they're putting on the multi-core chips. It's pretty obvious AMD is going to crush them there.

The problem as I see it is that Intel is a marketing machine. They throw millions of dollars each year into TV & magazine ads.. while you never see AMD ads on TV.. They also have the major computer vendors in a headlock, by unfair practices or not...

My younger brother sent me an email last week asking "What's an AMD" and I nearly wept... I was more than happy to indoctrinate him with my AMD views. Until consumers start doing actual research, or AMD scores a deal with a high-profile PC vendor like DELL, they're going to stay limited to the hard-core informed computer nerd and server markets.

Quote:Original post by pragma Fury
Intel's 'solution' for trying to keep up with AMD is a complete brute-force approach... Increase clock speed, give it more L2 cache, label it as "Extreme Edition" and jack up the price by $500.

No, it's anything but brute-force. It actually implements a hell of a lot of clever tricks and new features just to avoid the extreme pipeline crippling performance completely. A brute-force solution would be to just raise the clock speed, while changing nothing else. With Netburst, they changed virtually everything, just to avoid *losing* performance. And they succeeded at that. It is at least faster than a Pentium 3. ;)
It's still not a good CPU, but given the requirements from the higher-ups that it had to run at insane clockspeeds for the marketing value, they did an impressive job limiting the damage.

Most people would say a 30+ stage pipeline is suicidal, and would never be able to perform in the real world. The fact is that Intel actually managed to make it serve more or less well enough to stay competetive. They're hardly industry leaders when it comes to performance these days, but they're still in the race, at least. The poor Intel engineers deserves credit for that. They were given impossible, suicidal requirements, and they managed to avoid it falling completely apart. If you were told to make a crazy clockspeed-centric architecture as extreme as NetBurst, it takes serious skill just to avoid disaster. Or how about implementing 64-bit extensions in so little time? Yes, it has crappy performance in 64-bit mode, but it supports it. Again, Intel's engineers did an impressive job. They didn't have the luxury AMD had, of designing the entire architecture around it. Intel as a company has made some huge blunders lately, but thanks to some skilled engineers, they've limited the damage quite a lot.
If you read up on the NetBurst architecture, you'll see that it's far from a "brute force" architecture. It's the least crappy solution to a crazy brute-force'ish requirement.

Quote:
If I were them, I'd seriously look at rearchitecting their chip.. especially with all the hype they're putting on the multi-core chips. It's pretty obvious AMD is going to crush them there.

They are rearchitecting it, but it's not something you do from day to day. They don't have much choice other than to rely on the NetBurst architecture until they actually have a replacement.

Quote:The problem as I see it is that Intel is a marketing machine. They throw millions of dollars each year into TV & magazine ads.. while you never see AMD ads on TV..

Why is it a "problem" that they can afford to advertise?

Quote:
My younger brother sent me an email last week asking "What's an AMD" and I nearly wept... I was more than happy to indoctrinate him with my AMD views. Until consumers start doing actual research, or AMD scores a deal with a high-profile PC vendor like DELL, they're going to stay limited to the hard-core informed computer nerd and server markets.

Probably true. Lets hope their lawsuit improves matters.

Quote:Original post by pragma Fury
And then there's the whole Intel Anti-trust suit AMD filed, regarding Intel's questionable marketing techniques

Very interesting read. So much so, that it's decided what processor manufacturer I'll be buying with next: AMD. Rating++ for that. Thanks for the link.

Quote:Original post by Promit
I should point out that the Pentium 4's engineers are all HP employees. Intel didn't have a damned thing to do with NetBurst except for marketing and fab.

And deciding that "Hey, higher clockspeeds must be a good thing". [wink]
And hiring the ex-HP people. And mixing them with their own people too (Because no, it's not "just" HP employees.)