Intel, Celeron, and AMD

[Stogey23]

I'm looking to buy a laptop, possibly during the good deals going on during the next month or so.

I'm getting conflicting comments on whether I should avoid Celeron and AMD processors. They are certainly cheaper and claim the same speed as Intels...but should I avoid them or cash in on the savings?

This won't be a gaming laptop or graphics intensive laptop - just one that will last me for some years and be able to handle most of what I throw at it.

Thanks!

[JeremyEritrea]

Celerons were made by Intel. They've been replaced by the Core Duo.

http://www.intel.com/products/laptop/processors/index.htm

AMD is a completely different company.

http://multicore.amd.com/en/Products/Availability/

[Kryptonite]

My experience with Celerons was back in 2001/2002, which is practically the stone age when dealing with computers.

But we were using Celerons at ~500Mhz and they seemed MUCH slower than an Intel Pentium at 650Mhz. If I was doing simple things like playing a CD, surfing the web, using a chat client, and maybe one other thing, the clock would slow down. It was a public computer, so something funky could have been installed, but it was also set to clear itself out using GoBack once every 24 hours.

Eventually, I got to the point where i'd use my portable CD player instead of the one in the computer.

The prices I saw on Celeron computers vs. Pentium computers made me think that Celerons were more of a "budget-minded" computer.

Just a few years ago, everyone seemed to be saying that AMD was exactly the same (if not better) than Intel. Now, Intel appears to be gaining lost ground and could be taking the race back over.

The amount of RAM in a computer can also affect speed, so look at that as well. If you'd ever need extra, it's quite affordable, and easy to install.

[Grouchy]

I have been an AMD supporter for years but Intel is closing the gap in many ways.

For laptop performance, IMO, CPU speed is a secondary item unless you are going to doing one of the following: playing action games, ripping CD's to MP3's, ripping DVD's to AVI movies, doing video editing or lots image manipulation, or working with really large spreadsheets. To be honest, with every single laptop I've used the thing I wait on the most is the hard drive. My laptop has a 1Ghz AMD Duron processesor (yes, the nut roaster model) and it is still adequate for just about everything I do on it.

I would also put memory higher than CPU.

Windows XP does use a lot of CPU for little background things and beautifications but if you don't mind turning off the Window dressing (lol) you can cut back on some of that overhead.

With Christmas coming up you are going to see a lot of swell deals on Core2 and AMD laptops.

[Foosinho]

I like AMD processors, and in fact most of my current computers are AMD. I'll concur with Grouchy - in most cases CPU clock speed (a crude way of measuring FLOPS) is not the most important factor when it comes to computer performance. Disk IO is terribly slow, so the less of it you have to do, the less your CPU has to sit around wasting cycles waiting for data - so get bigger processor cache, and as much RAM as you can cram in the case.

If you have an OS that can take advantage of multiple cores, you'll see an advantage getting a dual-core (or dual-CPU) machine. But your copy of "Quake III" won't really run any faster - as most individual programs won't be able to utilize multiple cores. You'll just get better load balancing, and one runaway process that pegs it's core won't overload the OS, as essential UI operations can be migrated to the other core. Honestly, unless you run multiple processor-intensive applications at one time, your desktop machine will mostly have idle cycles on most of it's cores.

Personally, I tend to buy processors well back of the bleeding edge. My 1.5TB server I built earlier this year - that runs my mail, web, and SMB servers, as well as being my LAN fileserver and acting as my bitTorrent client, *AND* HPI's bittorrent tracker - is an AMD Sempron 2400+ with a half-a-gig of RAM, and it's usually idling at 0.05 load, or less.

My two-year-old desktop machine is similarly outfitted (but with more RAM, since it's running XP) and most of the time has plenty of power in reserve. When I do game on it (not often - I'm mostly on the XBox), it does reasonably well (has a decent NVidia card in it), and I can usually crank up the graphics without a significant framerate hit.

One thing I *really* like about the AMD chips, especially since I have so many computers, is the fact that they use less power than Intel, especially when at idle. In fact, at full power AMD chips use just barely more than Intel chips at idle. Now if I can just do something about that disk array's power usage...

[patrickdavila]

I hear good things about Intel dual cores for laptops.
These look real nice:
http://system76.com/

My next laptop will probably be purchased from them. Gotta love companies that avoid the M$ tax!. Here a listing of Linux and no-OS system vendors:
http://lxer.com/module/db/index.php?dbn=14

I recently got an AMD64 for my main workstation and it's running great. There's a noticeable increase in speed of encoding audio and video files. It definitely helps running a true 64 bit OS on it.

[Chicago1871]

My old system had an AMD that performed exceptionally well and most of what I've heard about the processor first hand has been positive. I'm currently running a laptop with one of the last iterations of the Celeron processor before Intel began putting the Core Duo into production. The Celeron has done pretty well considering some of the programs I've run on it (Photoshop, a couple different audio editors and a video editor). In the end, it's been "discontinued." I haven't talked to anyone running one of the new Core Duos, so I can't comment on its performance as of yet.

[srd....]

my new laptop has a AMD Turion64 in it.my first AMD b.t.w and it's been excellent so far :)