I'm looking at two low-end laptops, one with the Turion ML-28
processor, and the other the Celeron M 420. Is there likely to be
any noticeable difference in performance between these two? Or in
battery life?
A quick comparison of the two chips shows some reasonably similar
specs. The Turion ML-28 runs at 1.6GHz and has 512KB of cache while
the Celeron M 420 runs at 1.6GHz, has 1MB of cache and a 533MT/s bus
speed. The Turion is based off the Athlon64 core while the Celerom M
is based off the Pentium M core. Both of those two cores are pretty
darn good and they both perform reasonably similar on a clock for
clock basis. So in terms of performance, they're probably going to be
pretty close. I might give a slight nod to the Celeron M for
performance, but the difference is small enough that you probably
won't notice. Also, the other parts of the system (chipset, video,
hard drive, etc.) are definitely going to affect performance more than
any difference between the two processors.
For power consumption, the Celeron M is rated for a maximum power of
27W vs. the Turion ML-28 that is rated for a maximum power of 35W.
However that doesn't tell the whole story. The Celeron M is lacking
some of the dynamic power saving features of it's Pentium M cousin, so
it's power consumption at idle is going to be comparatively high. The
Turion doe shave quite good dynamic power saving technology, so it's
power consumption at idle is likely to be lower. So whenever your
processor is doing actual processing, the Turion will probably consume
more power, when it's not doing processing, the Celeron will consume
more power. If you're like most people, your processor will be idle
about 99% of the time, so for this one I would tend to give the nod to
the Turion for lower power consumption. If all else were equal, the
Turion would tend to have longer battery life. Of course, again other
system components will play a role here. The processor usually
consumes less than half of the power in a laptop, so things like the
display, video chipset, hard drive, etc. will all affect battery life.
And of course there is also the battery itself.
So, what does this leave you with? Well first and foremost, I would
look beyond the processor for your laptop selection. The differences
between these chips aren't great one way or the other and there are
other considerations that may be of greater importance. However if
the two laptops are basically identical other than the processors, my
choice would be for the Turion. Slightly lower power consumption for
most average workloads and it's a 64-bit chip. Windows Vista is going
to be 64-bt capable right out of the box, and while a 32-bit chip will
certainly run Vista and with little to no performance penalty, 64-bit
is going to be the norm. The Celeron M (like it's Pentium M and Core
Solo/Core Duo breathren) is one of the only 32-bit x86 chips still
being produced. Mind you, if your plan is to run 32-bit WinXP on the
system for it's lifetime then this is a non-issue.
