I’m looking at some new laptops, and I’m seeing the AMD Neo CPUs at 1.5GHz, and some of the new Intels at 1.3-1.8GHz. The laptops they are on come well supplied in terms of RAM (up to 8GB) and Video Cards (ATI’s with 2GB shared memory).
My question is, how do these laptops perform running heavy duity apps like Visual Studio, Photoshop, etc? I realize they wont run in full 3D settings, but how do games like WoW and Half-Life2 run on machines like these?
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0337298&utm_source=ACT_BYO&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=E0897+eNews+20100824
and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157108
Bottom line: how do these lower clock-speeds effect using heavy duity apps and some games? I’ve read some reviews that claim these machines (and ones like them) play games with medium 3D settings without any issues at all.
Solution:
Clock speed speed has been misleading for a long time now. Intel has had 3.2Ghz chips on the market since the P4 back in 2002/2003, and even at that time AMD’s lower-clocked alternatives out-performed them. Unfortunately, there’s not much to go on these days in terms of what the performance of a given chip really is without benchmarking.
But in the case of the AMD Neo family, the best comparison is to an Intel Atom processor used in the tiny netbooks. The Intel Atom is intended to give up some performance in exchange for better power use, a smaller chip size, and a lower price. In my experience, AMD’s Neo alternative kept a little more performance (of course in exchange for power consumption). Some of the nicer Neo’s perform as well as an older low-end Core 2 Duo, which, considering disk performance often matters than cpu these days, is still nothing to sneeze at. Pair that with one of the new low-power graphics chips from nVidia and you have a very portable and low-power system that still packs quite a wallop.