The Pentium M and AMD 64 architectures may be on par , the turion manages to keep up or beat the pentium M in any test , though it has higher power consumption under 100% load , thanks to superior AMD Power Now ! technology under light work eg. word processing , web surfing the Turion manages longer battery life .
And even though Turion overall was superior, Dothan is no slouch either. Although the Pentium M lost most of the benchmarks, it trailed behind by a mere 5% or less most of the time.
Test was done comparing a 2ghz Dothan rated at 25watt TDP with a 2ghz Turion rated at 35 watt tdp... its quite fair to compare equally clocked processors as they both have the same pipeline length , 12 stages , so performance per clock will be similar .
http://www.laptoplogic.com/resources/articles/42/1/1/ Also the Turion platform is a better performer for low end budget systems due to the usage of integrated ATI x300 video cards vs integrated Intel video ... and soon we'll see integrated geforce 6200 video for Turion platforms...Everyone knows how much intel video sucks... also the turion is cheaper by 50 US on average for an equally clocked Pentium M system with equal amounts of RAM etc. The chip itself is cheaper to manufacture
The turion is also a scaled down version of the AMD 64 core lacking dual channel memory bandwidth and maybe other things that will keep it from matching its desktop brethren in performance... so in the next generation of short pipeline Dothan based intel processors , AMD may still be able to keep up with improvements that it plans for next year eg.
dual channel DDRII ( tons of memory bandwidth delivered to the processor faster on Hypertransport than off a front side buss like Intel's, and latency should drop by next year) integrated PCI-X controllers ( lower latency to video card.... more performance) a shrink to 65 nm process which will allow for dirt cheap dual and single core processors , and probably triple and quad cores.....
also may i mention a few upcoming releases... a new line of nvidia motherboard chipsets with integrated geforce 6200 and high definition audio (trinimc plans to get one) ... rumoured to be a successor to soundstorm.. R520 (16? pipelines???) ,RV530 (12 pipelines) and RV515 (4 pipelines) boards will start shipping in bulk at the end of september , so expect to see what ATI is capable of then or early october ( nice birthday present ati, trinimc was born on october 5th...)
Also there is a 4th ati chip in production , the RV516 , only chip not produced by TSMC's 90nm processs , but by an american manufacturer under 90nm , could be an 8 pipe graphics card for the area between low and medium end , 4 pipe cards on 110nm process already go for 50 US and less , 90nm will make them cheaper... thus there will be a gap between bottom low end (4 pipes 50 US, 9600 xt level performance) ... and medium end
(200 US , 12 pipe , X800 XL/6800gt performance)
i know the x800xl and 6800gt have 16 pipes.. but these cards are 12 x 600mz = 7200 vs 16 x 400 = 6400
