PCMark spits out some number that I have a hard time applying practically to anything, and I’ve found that the best purpose these benchmarks serve is being able to check and see if your computer is running like it’s supposed to by comparing with an existing benchmark of similar/identical hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve just hated them more and more. Now, I’m going to get this out of the way right now: I HATE synthetic benchmarks. In all testing situations, these two notebooks were configured as identically as possible. But these two notebooks really basically are at price parity, with the Intel one tending to be a little more pricey. For the dv2610us I’m using, for example, I paid $699. I post 'typical price' because the prices of these units tend to vary pretty significantly. * Memory was upgraded in each unit from the 1GB DDR2-667 (2x512MB) the notebooks shipped with. If you removed the stickers from them, you’d never tell them apart. The two competing notebooks are remarkably similar in their configurations and provide a nice apples-to-apples comparison: the AMD based HP Pavilion dv2610us and the Intel based HP Pavilion dv2615us. What we’re interested in is how much we can get for how little we pay.

So today we’re not going to compete on clock for clock or any of those other BS metrics, because in the end for the vast majority of us, they don’t matter. But Intel’s ruthlessness is our benefit as consumers, because their willingness to reduce processor prices to put the hurt on AMD forces AMD to reduce their own processor prices, and that pretty much brings us to where we are today: two otherwise identically configured notebooks separated by $100 in the marketplace. Intel’s had the best mobile platform for a few years with AMD constantly playing catch-up, blowing their one chance on any kind of lead by delivering the Turion 64 X2 months late and right on schedule to compete with Intel’s mobile Core 2 Duo. Prior to mid-2006 and the release of Intel’s Core 2 Duo on the desktop, Intel had a healthy lead in the mobile market while AMD’s chips were the best desktop performers by far, and unfortunately, AMD didn’t think to try and strangle the life out of its longtime rival by lowering its prices to continue to apply pressure.Ĭue 2007, where Intel continues to step on AMD’s head while they’re drowning. They’ve had a lot of back and forth over the years, which of course has generally been great for the consumer as actual competition often is, and this past year has been particularly vicious between the two. Sure, you can joke about your Cyrix, your VIA or your Transmeta, but the only ones we ever took seriously were AMD and Intel. As far as CPUs and platforms go, it’s been AMD and Intel for a long time now.

Amd turion ii p540 vs i7 640