AMD's Dual Core Laptops Have Arrived: Introducing the Turion 64 X2

MobileMark 2005 Battery Life And Performance Rating: Conclusions

As you can see, the performance of a Turion 64 X2 platform such as the HP Compaq nx6325 can easily keep pace with a comparable Intel system. The battery life is more difficult to interpret, though. Superficially, Intel seems to be far ahead, but if you consider that the battery in the Dell laptop has a much higher total energy than the HP systems, the situation looks different.

The following charts show the power consumption of the test systems in the three different scenarios of MobileMark 2005.

Using simple elementary school mathematics, you can easily calculate that the energy consumption of the dual-core platform based on the combination of an AMD Turion64 X2 processor and an AMD chipset is somewhere from 1 W to almost 3.5 W higher than that of a comparable Intel laptop platform. Moreover, this calculation does not account for the fact that the Dell Inspiron 9400 has a 17" display, which is much larger than that of the HP nx6325, resulting in a base load that is approximately 1 W higher.