Originally posted by: Caveman
What's a Sempron? Lower cache memory, right? Would seem to cripple it...
How about AMDs answer to the Centrino core for mobile computing? Is there an AMD counterpart?
I'm trying to recommend a budget laptop for my Dad and don't know much about the mobile chips...
Can anyone help?
Yes, the Sempron is the current budget version of the Athlon, it replaced the Duron. However, AMD budget chips have never been as crippled as Intel Celerons. (actually, the latest Celerons, the Celeron D and Celeron M, are not that crippled)
AMD's answer in to the Centrino branding is the Turion.
Fundamentally, a laptop with a Sempron is still pretty much a Turion, and a laptop with a Celeron M is still pretty much a Centrino. However, the Celeron M's lack the speedstep technology of the Pentium M's so they do much worse on battery life; the Semprons still have AMD's PowerNow so they fair better in battery life.
A Turion is a 1MB L2 cache Athlon 64 with only single channel memory. Can have a 333mhz or 400mhz memory, always has a 400mhz fsb. (200x2)
A Sempron is a 128KB to 256KB L2 cache Athlon 64 with only single channel memory. Can have a 333mhz or 400mhz memory, always has a 400mhz fsb.
The current Pentium M is a 2MB L2 cache...Pentium M. Can have dual or single channel memory, can have varying memory speeds but the FSB is always 400mhz or 533mhz. (100x4 or 133x4) Older Pentium Ms only had 1MB L2 cache.
Celeron M is a 1MB L2 cache Pentium M with speedstep disabled. Other than that it's identicle to the Pentium M, old Celeron Ms used to have 512KB L2 cache.
You can roughly say that every time L2 cache is halved, 200mhz of performance is lost. So the Sempron is a Turion with -400mhz to -600mhz performance lost, depending on cache size.
The Celeron M is a Pentium M with -200mhz performance lost. (told you modern Celerons weren't that bad, though Celeron Ms are typically only available at lower clock speeds so that 200mhz is a bigger percentage chunk)
Oh, and the new big daddy of mobile architectures is Intel's Core Duo. This is a basically a Pentium M, but with two processor cores and a shared L2 cache (and faster fsb, 166mhz x 4). Because the L2 cache is shared, performance is hurt (I think L2 latency goes up by like 50%), but overall I'd say it's worth getting. It's also even better than the Pentium M or Turion in battery life, and the only way to get dual core in a laptop currently.
Currently, Dell's Inspiron E1705, Gateway's NX560, and HP's dv1000t series (they may have a slightly cheaper compaq equivalent as well) are a few of the only laptops to offer the Core Duo. Apple also offers it in their newest laptops, but those don't run Windows.
Of course, a downside of Intel's mobile products is that they don't have 64 bit support and Intel's integrated graphics (GMA 900/950) aren't fully Microsoft Windows Vista ready (add in ati and nvidia chips are just fine).
AMD's downside is that they don't have dual core in any mobile product, don't support DDR2 (which I think is pretty important for both prices, capacities larger than 2GB of ram, and possibly battery life), but they do have 64 bit and their basic integrated graphics chip (Radeon Xpress 200) is fully Vista ready.
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