AMD's New Centrino Killer: The Turion

Special Report: By David Johnston
AMD officially announced its Turion line of processors today. Designed more or less from the ground up to be mobile, AMD is hoping to position them against Intel's Pentium M line. The Turion stacks up very favorably to the Pentium M as far as performance and features are concerned. According to AMD's in-house benchmarking, the Turion beats the Pentium M in almost all games, all of the office productivity tests they ran, and even edges the Pentium M out in digital media areas like MP3 and MPEG encoding.

Of course, you can expect AMD's benchmarks to be more than a little biased in their processor's favor. The Turion's power consumption is very close to that of the Pentium M, meaning that if all else is equal it will have similar battery life. It will be interesting to see if this actually happens, however, because the chipset will probably be the deciding factor on which chip gets the best battery life overall. Of course, the Turion also features AMD's excellent on-die memory controller which greatly improves memory bandwidth and latency as well as the 64-bit extensions and NX-bit support found in AMD's Athlon 64 line. There are also rumors about that the Turion is in a very good position to make the move to dual-core in the near future.

This is all great news from AMD, but we'll have to see how the Turion really stacks up when it becomes available later this month. One thing that is bugging me a little bit about the Turion is AMD's naming scheme. Instead of going with its proven xx00+ ratings, it decided to use ML-xx and MT-xx (where the x's are numbers) to differentiate the Turions. The ML line is the performance line and the MT line is the lower-power line. AMD claims 35 watt power dissipation for the ML's and 25 watts for the MT's. Actual clock speeds vary from 1.6Ghz to 2Ghz on the ML line and 1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz on the MT line. AMD also varies the amount of cache (a favorite thing for both AMD and Intel to do recently) between 512KB and 1MB on both lines. I hope the Tech Report updates their CPU Decoder Ring soon, because the Turion's naming scheme sure is a mess.

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