The AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Processor

Chip Wars: Mobile Dual Core Edition

While Intel and AMD have fought it out to earn a spot (or socket) in the motherboard of your desktop, Intel has pretty much dominated the portable market for quite some time now. Even with AMD the first to both 64 bit processing and dual cores, they did not agrressively go after the notebook chips like they should have. This is from a guy that had to search high and low to find a notebook that used a chip from AMD (Averatec if you're wondering). As the market for notebooks has increased (and is expected to pass desktops), it has become more critical for AMD to have a competitive offering for this important mobile market.

Last week, AMD released their newest processor- the Turion™ 64 X2. This is the high hope of a chip from AMD that can finally compete with Intel's latest mobile offerings. Trust me, the XP-M, and the Mobile Semprons were inexpensive, but not exactly screamers. My XP-M 2200+ also runs quite warm despite PowerNow! technology which is analogous to Intel's SpeedStep, and provides for a variable clock rate on the CPU to match processing demand.

AMD's latest offering, the Turion 64 X2, is designed to compete with the latest from the Intel camp, the Core Duo. With the public having Centrino on their minds, AMD needs a home run, rather than a bunt to just get on base.

I pulled the stats on the AMD Turion 64 X2 chips. You can see them here. Of course now AMD comes up with an equally confusing number scheme to match Intel's numerical mess. Couldn't they just stick with the PR (eg: 3200+) numbers?

Anyway, the top Mobile Turion X2 is the TL-60,, and expected to retail for $354. It has a clock speed of 2.0 GHz. The TL-60 sports an L1 cache of 128 KB for each core, and 512 kb of L2 cache per core. It is based on 90 nanometer technology, and draws 35 Watts of power.

It's instructive to see how the new Turion X2 compares to Intel's latest offering in the notebook arena, the Core Duo. Their top mobile chip, the T2600 runs at a clock speed of 2.16 GHz. This is a little quicker than the AMD, but not by much. The L1 cache is 32 KB for each core, and then 2 MB of L2 cache shared between the cores. Traditionally, Intel has been using a smaller L1 cache than AMD, and balancing it with a larger L2 cache. It's hard to say who has the advantage here. Intel does have the advantage in the 65 nanometer architecture, and draws less power at 31 Watts which should help the battery life.

Up until now, it looks like the Intel chip has the advantage. However, AMD has two more features that help it pull ahead. The first is that the Turion X2 features 64 bit technology. While, thus far, there have been few (just about none) actual native 64 bit applications, I don't see users trading in their Athlon 64 processors by the boatload because they do run 32 bit code quite quickly. The other AMD only feature is that there is a crossbar between cores to allow them to communicate faster. This AMD feature is why the Athlon X2 runs faster than similar Intel offerings, which has caused Intel to send their dual cores to the market quite affordably.

These two features give the nod to AMD's new Turion X2, at least for this week. When Intel releases its Core 2 Duo processor, later this year, then it will add 64 bit support, and AMD's tiny advantage starts to disappear. While I don't think AMD got the home run, it looks like they got a double, with a fast runner on base.

The good news for consumers is that with AMD getting into mobile processors a lot more seriously, Intel will have to price accordingly. The "Chip Wars: Mobile Dual Core Edition" are on in full force. This should make for some very affordable laptops in time for the back to school season, assuming this processors appear in quantity.

--Jonas

For our analysis of the brand new AM2 socket from AMD, head on over to here.