What is faster? Intel Celeron Processor 900 vs. AMD Athlon II dual-core processor M320?
Is there any way to really know which is faster? The AMD is $100 more and wondering if it's worth the extra expense:
HP G71-329WM Laptop PC: Intel Celeron Processor 900 Provides 2.2GHz speed, an 800MB frontside bus, and 1MB L2 cache
HP Pavilion dv7-3069wm MediaSmart Laptop PC: 2.1GHz AMD Athlon II dual-core processor M320 Designed specifically for notebook PCs, AMD delivers enhanced performance and battery life with 1MB Level 2 Cache and up to 3.2GT/s System bus
The AMD is .1 slower but it's dual core. Please help me!
Thanks for your opinion.
Pete
Emanuel2009-12-05T07:38:45Z
Favorite Answer
The thing that misleads most customers is that the power of a processing unit is calculated in operations per second. That frequency is just a clock tact after which the processor works and coordinates its instructions. It has no relevant meaning.
This means that for one tact, Hertz, on CPU could be doing more FLOPS than the other.
A dual core has two complete processing units in a single casing, generally with independent level 1 and level 2 caches and a shared level 3 cache. By comparison, a hyperthreaded processor (with one core) appears as two logical processing units, with many resources shared between them. What a dual core, or hyperthreading, DOES NOT do, is double the speed. If something is not optimized for multithreading, then it can only occupy a single core (or thread of hyperthreading) at a time, though the presence of an extra core or thread can allow background tasks to proceed without taking anything away. Since pretty much any processor is at least dual or hyperthreaded thes days (even the Netbook ATOM N4xx series processor is hyperthreaded), then we can expect to see better usage of multithreading in future
The Celeron 900 has the faster clock speed, but then the M320 Athlon has 2 cores The M320 gets a job done much faster than the Celeron 900 & thats what matters to me for results
And yes, benchmarks give you a much better picture http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html M320 is at #95 & Celeron 900 at #169