Gateway NV52 and NV58 notebooks - from Anandtech.com

The folks over at Anandtech took two identical notebooks, save for the opposing Intel and AMD CPU’s, and gave their batteries a pounding. Guess who won?

Win might be a little misleading. Among several different battery tests, covering the spread from idle to DVD playback, runtime on the Intel system surpassed the AMD version by 20-35%. Keep in mind these notebooks are identical save for the CPU and chipset, being Gateway models NV58 (Intel) and NV52 (AMD). While this article didn’t test performance, it has been well established that the Core 2 Duo lineup is leaps and bounds faster than any mobile chip from AMD.

While the Turion 64 X2 should be a bit less power hungry than the Athlon 64 X2 tested here, performance will drop even more and it still won’t make up the 28% average difference in runtime. As I said on my soapbox last week, AMD doesn’t need a netbook CPU. It needs a mobile CPU to compete in the notebook space in the first place. While in this instance the AMD-based Gateway notebook is $80 cheaper, that alone isn’t enough to keep them in the game. It doesn’t help that several PC manufacturers don’t even offer AMD-based notebooks.

Source: [Anandtech]