On the surface, the Turion has much in common with Socket 754 Athlon 64 chips. The ML-44 is the latest addition to AMD’s Turion line of mobile processors. Instead these processors look more like an Athlon XP or an old-school Pentium III. The Turion 64 ML-44 (left) and Pentium M 760 (right)īeing mobile chips, neither the Pentium M 760 nor the Turion ML-44 has the protective “heatspreader” cap that’s become standard on desktop processors.
We’ll start off with an up-close and personal view of the two contenders: With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the two most widely available mobile processors today: the Pentium M versus the Turion 64. Core Duo laptops are just starting to arrive on the market, although volumes are still somewhat limited. Intel’s recently announced Core Duo marks the beginning of a transition to multicore processors in the mobile space, and AMD has stated its intention to make a dual-core version of the Turion, as well.
Well, we wanted to find out before the game changes again. AMD has done well with Opteron in servers and the Athlon 64 in desktops, but surely AMD’s K8-derived mobile competitor doesn’t match up with the likes of the Pentium M.
The Pentium M’s power-saving features and performance per watt are the stuff of modern legend. We have been watching the mobile processor space for a while now with some interest, wondering whether the Turion 64 really matches up well against the Pentium M. The model we’ll be looking at today is the ML-44, a new chip with a 2.4GHz operating frequency and 1MB of L2 cache. The Turion 64’s attributes include an on-die memory controller, a 1GHz HyperTransport link, and of course the ability to run 64-bit code. Near the top of the heap is the Pentium M 760, which features a 533MHz front-side bus, an operating frequency of 2.0GHz and a whopping 2MB of L2 cache.ĪMD’s answer to the Pentium M is the Turion 64, an Athlon 64-based design which rides in a 754-pin socket. In fact, the Pentium M has been doing so well that Intel’s desktop line will eventually be migrating to a processor based on a similar architecture. 3.7.A LTHOUGH INTEL HAS BEEN STRUGGLING on the desktop front of late, things on the mobile side have been going just fine, thank you.3.2 Turion II mobile processors (Phenom-based).3.1 Turion II Ultra mobile processors (Phenom-based).2.2.8 Phenom II 42 TWKR (C2, 45 nm, Quad-core, Limited Edition).Processors with a "u" following the model number (e.g., 270u) are ultra-low-power models, typically 20 W for single core chips or 25 W for dual core chips. Processors with an "e" following the model number (e.g., 910e) are low-power models, typically 45 W for Athlons, 65 W for Phenoms. An improved second generation was released in December 2008, named Phenom II. The first Phenoms were released in November 2007. Other related processors based on the K10 microarchitecture include the Athlon X2 "Kuma" processors, Athlon II processors, and various Opteron, Sempron, and Turion series. It includes the Phenom II X6 hex-core series, Phenom X4 and Phenom II X4 quad-core series, Phenom X3 and Phenom II X3 tri-core series, and Phenom II X2 dual-core series.
The AMD Phenom family is a 64-bit microprocessor family from AMD, based on the K10 microarchitecture. JSTOR ( July 2010) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.įind sources: "List of AMD Phenom microprocessors" – news Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.