“If you’re looking for notebook power on the cheap and you’re not too keen on either using Intel’s integrated graphics or paying for a higher-performing, NVIDIA-made workaround (i.e., Optimus), then there’s an obvious alternative mobile platform for you: AMD/ATI. AMD is gaining steam in the mobile space due to a combination of low cost and its ATI Radeon graphics solution, with Reuters reporting that the company will better than double the number of design wins this back-to-school season compared to a year ago.”
AMD/ATI is a great platform…hardware wise and I trust they have plans to make it even better ie complete obsoletion of 64 and 32 bit memory interfaces would be nice 128bit should be at least the standard.
The low end IGPs are fairly fast but also haven’t progressed much in the past few iterations ie radeon 3200 4200 and the low end 5x proform about the same (probably mostly memory interface limited)
I have a radeon 4200 which runs both the ati binary driver and mesa r600 quite well
which came in a windows 7 (Replaced by Gentoo and Haiku) laptop with an athlon II M300 overall a very good deal except for the battery life which is a bit short ~2:30 hours that is the major issue AMD/ATI will beat anything intel and nvidia can make price wise but for some reason they mate these laptops with meager batteries X.x
Edited 2010-05-09 20:37 UTC
You do realize that it’s mostly Microsoft and their lack of ability to support different bit sizes that is one of the primary drivers in the slowness of the x86 platform for that kind of thing right?
Now, they’ve certainly gotten a little better now having to support both 32-bit and 64-bit x86, but not by much.
So expect Microsoft to keep that one from you for another decade or so – or until Microsoft goes away, whichever comes first.
i just bought a Compaq cq61-420us and it works great AMD M320 and a ATI 4200 more than adequate for what I use it for.
I want to see Apple switch to AMDs in their laptops. Intel chips have proven too hot and the i*’s are turning into a joke. Apple must realise that just as with PowerPC before they’re become trapped by a power/heat problem that it doesn’t look like Intel are going to solve anytime soon.
No the joke is that a Core 2 Duo at 2ghz is plenty of power for the vast majority and yet companies like Apple want to stick the fastest cpu into a light and thin laptop for marketing reasons.
Switching to AMD is not going the change the problem.
Actually in my experience the AMD chips run hotter. Apple’s issue is poor design in the cooling portion of the laptops, and they would have the same issue if they had AMD chips instead. Of course I have no numbers or anything, just my personal experience.
Personally I wouldn’t label what they do as ‘poor design’. Poor design denotes either ignorance or sloppiness – a lapse in judgement and/or human error. I would call Apple a pack of idiots because what it shows is that they’re more concerned with looks than practicality. They have thin fetish where they would sooner cripple their devices or ignore the downside of the design than make the device maybe a couple of millimetres thicker. I’ve got a MacBook Pro 13.3 inch, when I compress a video the CPU gets up to around 100 degree’s celsius – one can’t honestly expect me to believe that such a high temperature isn’t causing long term damage if such a temperature is held for a long period of time.
As I noted previously due to a combination of ignoring Mac OS X on the desktop in favour of an almost fixation on developing i-devices (at the expense of their laptops/desktops), their attitude as so far as refusing to work with partners (they would sooner screw over the partners and in turn their customers simply to make a political point), the impractical designs that result in ‘great balls of fire’ if the laptop is rested on ones lap and so on and so on. Good bye Apple, hello – well, who ever provides a better Windows 7 powered laptop on the PC side of the market.
Stay the hell away from Sony then since they do the same thing with their VAIOs. Some of their laptops have inadequate cooling systems and they compensate by throttling the cpu in Windows power settings. I watched a 1 year old Sony VAIO overheat and turn off after 25 minutes because its power settings had been reset to default. Sony sucks.
I admit I was tempted at one stage to get a Sony laptop but when I looked at the design of it, it was going to perform no better than a MacBook. Personally I am tempted either by Toshiba, Lenovo or Dell. I drawn to Lenovo mainly because I want to get a desktop and laptop all from the same place but if I do have to cut my loses I’ll get a Lenovo T series laptop and maybe a Dell desktop – although the Dell laptops look pretty good. My old man has a Inspiron 1318 and it runs Windows 7 extremely well – I’d be looking at getting a Studio 15. Mind you by the time I get it the ‘Sandy Bridge’ Intel processor will be out by then which should be even more power efficient, cooler and faster
I’ve got a MBP 13.3 myself, It’s an incredible machine c’mon! Yeah, It gets hot when the CPU is at 100% for a long time… but that happens with every notebook out there!! (even old sub-Ghz PowerPCs used to get hot)
MBPs are incredible machines, the best you can buy. I have a 2x price Lenovo Thinkpad for work and It sucks. It’s as hot as any Macbook, It’s heavy, It’s horrible and really expensive!!
If you know a notebook better than Apple ones, please let me know (I don’t care about the price). Really.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook Pro but at the same time it is ridiculous that a processor can get to 100 degrees celsius before the fans finally kick in to cool it down – the fans should have kicked in at 70 degree’s. No I am not going to use SMCfan because it is something that Apple themselves should have programmed into their firmware. Why don’t they do it? because of their ‘thin and quiet’ fetish.
I’ve owned a Thinkpad T61p in the past and sure it was heavier (15inch versus 13.3inch, I don’t really care though) but it was fast, reliable, it was never hot because the fans kicked in at an appropriate time with plenty of ventilation rather than one solitary outlet in the case of my MacBook. I never once remember my Thinkpad T61p getting to 100 degree’s.
Edited 2010-05-11 00:52 UTC
The maximum operating temperature for the E8600 is 72.4 degrees Celsius.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_2/Intel-Core%202%20Duo~*…
What model of CPU do you have?
I have a P8700 in this laptop, which according to this:
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=37006
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_2/Intel-Core%202%20Duo~*…
The maximum is 105 degree’s celsius – but getting to 100 degree’s celsius is something I can’t see benefiting the hardware in the long run.
Better in what way? Macbooks are good for battery life but that is about it. Any Toshiba or Asus off the shelf with a similar cpu will run cooler.
The myth of them being far ahead of other laptops when it comes to reliability is really just a myth
http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/44709-apple-laptops-less-r…
I prefer 15.4″ laptops but if I was going to carry a 13.3″ I would get a Toshiba U505
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCgxSaaYWS0
For me it all comes back to whether it runs Mac OS X but now that the gap between Mac OS X has closed with Windows 7 – the reason for having a Mac (in my case) pretty much ceases. In the future all evidence shows from Apple is that their main focus is on i-devices, which is all very nice but what about those of us with computers? hence my reason for jumping ship – the new direction is pretty much ignoring computers in favour of i-devices thus I don’t expect to see Mac OS X getting the desperate attention it requires such as extending hardware accelerated decoding to all GPU’s that support it, or long standing bugs in the frameworks being fixed, or addressing crappy graphics performance.
I know when I look to the Windows world that if I bought a laptop from a year ago I’d be having DXVA support, DirectX 10.1, a media player that isn’t a hog in every respects, an operating system designed by a company that can walk and chew chewing gum at the same time versus with Apple where the resources are being diverted from the desktop to i-device development. I’ve got an iMac that is just under 18 months old and the hardware accelerated decoding framework doesn’t support ATI devices and yet if I was running Windows 7 on the exact same device I would have hardware accelerated h264 decoding along with other formats.
I can understand Apple unable to extend support for hardware that just doesn’t support it but I do have an issue when Apple refuses to support hardware features simply off the back of pushing people to upgrade. Apple adds a new feature to Mac OS X and anyone with a device older than a year is screwed. People talk about Windows forcing end users to upgrade yet deliberately ignore the fact that a laptop from 2 years ago will run Windows 7 nicely with many of the advanced features like DVXA and DirectX 10.1/11 supported by their hardware versus Apple whose hardware support cuts off after a year.
You’re kidding right? The Macbook’s are heavy for 13.3 machines. I’ve a lenovo x200 here and have yet to see the cpu run hotter than 55 degrees and I’m compiling software and running simulations. It’s also 1.7 kg with the large battery (10h battery life). I owned a Sony Vaio SZ before and that was a piece of shit. The drive died after a couple of weeks apparently a common problem. It was also always hot, but before I got the x200 it started becoming so hot that I could not use the keyboard anymore.
Well I like an HP 13″ laptop with a resistive touchscreen that was sold some months ago. (Don’t know the exact reference, sorry, borrowed it from a friend).
The touchscreen itself is a joke, but the 300€ that he paid for it are a pretty nice price for a machine which can run a lot of not-so-old games (like half-life 2, say), has got some serious processing power, very good connectivity, decent battery life (we could spend an afternoon playing the sample microsoft touch games on it before it ran out, I feel this is enough), does not gets hot, and is reasonably light and pretty (though not the best in that area).
I like its keyboard too. It offers nearly as much comfort as my desktop keyboard. But for people who prefer mac-like keyboards (soft tiny keys with lots of space around them), it may feel a bit clunky however…
Edited 2010-05-11 22:25 UTC
I don’t think AMD’s notebooks are looking up. Sure, Intel’s i3 CPUs have IPG with bog-standard Intel graphics, but the i5s and i7s in notebooks are still GPU-less, and are usually paired up with ATI or Nvidia graphics solutions, just as in the Core 2 days.
I just don’t believe in AMD anymore. Their notebook processors are a spectacular ‘meh’, as are their CULV chips. And of course they are behind on the desktop CPUs; if it wasn’t for AMD’s 6 core desktop CPU being $1,000 cheaper than Intel’s, there would be no reason to buy AMD.
Yep. You pretty much sum it up.
So, you don’t believe it’s looking up, yet you explain half of why it is? AMD is willing to work with low margins, where Intel usually isn’t, and AMD is going to be integrating superior IGP to what Intel offers very shortly.
I agree the prospects are looking up, I could even consider one next time I buy a laptop.
When I bought my last computer, I just locked at Intel based laptops. So I bought one with a Core 2 duo, and AMD/ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4600.
And when they integrate their CPU and GPU it will probably be more attractive then Intels offering (excluding NVIDIA Optimus).
I always buy AMD processors both in my desktops and Laptops. They are fast enough for my needs and I believe in supporting the underdog. Also I don’t like Intel’s bully like behavior in the marketplace.
I just purchased an MSI U230 12-inch netbook. It has an AMD Athlon Neo X2 dual-core processor, and an ATI 3200HD video processor. It can do 720p video quite well (it has a 1366×768 native resolution). It has 4-hour battery life, and I am dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 (I’m mostly in Ubuntu). This netbook is really a small laptop, and it cost $479. I think AMD/ATI fits very well in this market.
Back when my primary desktop was Microsoft I hated ATI, their drivers have and still do blow. Now that I haven’t run MS for a number of years Nvidia was and still is the best video card IMO. They’ve always maintained good quality drivers and have supported to the Linux community very well. This is why I won’t buy an AMD powered Laptop, that is until ATI actually starts producing quality drivers.
Don’t you mean until your favorite xorg driver developers start producing quality drivers? They can do that, you know. Now, they even work well for 9xxx and Xxxx(x) series cards, which was a sore spot for me up to mid/late last year.
Back in MS land, nVidia and AMD’s drivers are about on par. With Vista and 7, nVidia has given me quite a bit of minor grief. nVidia’s current drivers aren’t like the nVidia drivers from the late 90s to early 00s; meanwhile, AMD has taken ATI’s steaming pile of waste and rotting animals, and turned it into a video driver that I can rely on.
I got burned by ATI and have had great luck with Nvidia, I’ll stick with them. I’ve also got an HP Mini Netbook with the ION, it rocks. Runs Linux very well and is perfect for a portable.
“If” ATI ever gets it together I “might” take them for a test drive, but I seriously doubt it unless Nvidia falls below ATI’s quality which I seriously doubt.