8. Turion 64 Or Mobile Sempron: Which CPU For What Uses?

Naturally, we tried to find an answer to the question of which of the three AMD CPUs we tested - namely, the Turion 64 MT-34, Turion ML-34, and Mobile Sempron 2800+ - fit some specific use particularly well and, where possible, stretched itself past it limits. To measure the behavior of these processors under various typical usage scenarios we tried them out separately in our Megabook M635 test system. Here's what we chose for our usage scenarios:

Playback of a video DVD Delivery of a PowerPoint presentation, as an example of a reasonably power-hungry Office application 3D game play

DVD Playback

For our first case we chose a nine-minute segment from the movie Apollo 13 for playback. During that time we logged CPU utilization continuously, including the core voltage and core clock rate, and wrote all captured values to a data file. Taken together, these three values allow us to determine very well how heavily a specific application loads the CPU. With the aid of measurements of the fluctuation of the CPU frequency and core voltage, we can also draw conclusions about the expected battery life in this particular usage scenario as well. The results from our first series of tests are shown in the following three charts.

For DVD playback the mean value load for the two Turion 64s (shown in a yellow line in the charts) runs at the 19% level. The Mobile Sempron shows a mean load of nearly twenty percent. The core clock (green line) and the core voltage (purple line) don't change over time for any of these three models. For this application, our conclusion is that all three CPUs have more than enough unused capacity left over. A notebook with a Mobile Sempron processor works just as well for this scenario as a more expensive Turion 64 system. Where battery life is concerned, however, the Sempron system fares slightly worse because the core is more heavily loaded (and thus draws more power).