I'm considering two laptops which are nearly identical except for the
processors mentioned in the subject line. I'm trying to determine if the
Athlon 64 is worth paying $350 more for. My applications will mostly be
typical business use (documents, spreadsheets, Internet, etc), and
occasionally some number-crunching engineering work.

It's hard to find benchmark comparisons, but what I have been able to find
suggests that the performance boost in going to the Athlon 64 3000+ is only
about 10% to 15%. I would have expected a larger difference.

Anyone have opinions on how these CPUs compare? Any other differences
between the two that I should consider, besides computing performance?

M.

Marrow wrote:

If by "number-crunching engineering work" you mean FEA and the like then see
if there's a 64-bit version of your application. If so I think you'll find
a major performance difference.

That 10-15% is running 32-bit apps on a 32-bit OS. 64-bit Windows (free
beta for a year) adds an increment, 64-bit Linux runs about twice as fast
as 32-bit. But they all run faster on the A64.

However this may be moot--the 64-bit operating systems work well enough on
desktops but IMO they aren't quite ready for prime-time on laptops. Too
much still needs tweaking to get everything working right.
--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

"J. Clarke" <jclarke@nospam.invalid> writes:
Hmm, are you using Linux and what issues are you facing?

Paul Rubin wrote:

Neither 64-bit Linux nor 64-bit Windows has a full set of clean, reliable
drivers for the sorts of peripherals that one finds built-in on laptops.
Further, both break a certain percentage of application code.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

"J. Clarke" <jclarke@nospam.invalid> writes:
If you mean the Broadcom wifi card, yeah, I know about that. There's
also issues with the video chip in those Compaq units. Is there more?

What do you mean by this?

Paul Rubin wrote:

The Gentoo folks don't seem to be able to get the Synaptics touchpad drivers
working, and most of the bluetooth stuff is also masked--I can get basic
Bluetooth functioning to work for a few minutes but it's not stable. And
of course there are no 3D drivers for anything from ATI. On the Windows
side I don't recall what all wasn't working, all I recall is that it didn't
work well enough for me to want to bother with it.

I mean that a certain percentage of application code simply does not run
unless you compile it 32-bit and run it as 32-bit code, which if there is
no precompiled binary available means a whole new set of annoyances.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)