Intel's Pentium M 760 versus AMD's Turion 64 ML-44

ALTHOUGH INTEL HAS BEEN STRUGGLING on the desktop front of late, things on the mobile side have been going just fine, thank you. In fact, the Pentium M has been doing so well that Intel's desktop line will eventually be migrating to a processor based on a similar architecture. Heck, even Apple joined in on the fun. Near the top of the heap is the Pentium M 760, which features a 533MHz front-side bus, an operating frequency of 2.0GHz and a whopping 2MB of L2 cache.

AMD's answer to the Pentium M is the Turion 64, an Athlon 64-based design which rides in a 754-pin socket. The Turion 64's attributes include an on-die memory controller, a 1GHz HyperTransport link, and of course the ability to run 64-bit code. The model we'll be looking at today is the ML-44, a new chip with a 2.4GHz operating frequency and 1MB of L2 cache.