3. Pros, Cons And Prices: What The CPUs Offer, And How Much They Cost, Continued

With regard to the theoretically best possible thermal power loss with a maximum clock rate, the two mobile processors are hardly distinguishable.

This is astonishing at first glance, because according to the formula,

P=C*f*V 2 CC

where
C: overall capacity of all gates of the CPU;
F: clock rate of the CPU;
V CC: input voltage of the CPU;
which defines energy use P and thus also the thermal power of a processor, the low-voltage Athlon XP-M should actually be a nose ahead in this respect.

The Pentium M 1.6 GHz, after all, works with a clearly higher input voltage and a higher clock rate, has considerably more transistors and an L2 cache that is four times as large. But if we recall the "intelligent" circuitry of the L2 cache of the Pentium-M, in which only 1/32 of the L2 cache is "permanently" active, and technologies like IMVP, it becomes clear how a feat like this was possible. Naturally, AMD's LV mobile processor also has PowerNow! energy-saving technology. Intel recently countered this with its "improved" Enhanced SpeedStep technology.

We could speculate a lot on whether one or the other implementation is better, but since we're not into reading tea leaves, we will let the test results speak for themselves. We will tell you this much, though: the two technologies are similar in that the CPU is operated at various frequencies and input voltages depending on the load. Switching between the individual set points occurs automatically. The user also has the option of influencing the operating performance somewhat by selecting an energy scheme.