I am looking at different types of pavilion notebooks and I am wondering about the differences between AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium M processors. Is one better than the other? I know Microsoft is the boss, but I don't know anything about this other name. Is it as good? Is it like comparing hot dogs to caviar? Is it the same? Or are they not comparible? The Athlon has a higher Ghz #, but is that always good? 2.2 Athlon vs. 1.86 pentium m? I don't know anything about any of this. Aidez-moi s'il vous plait.

AMD vs Intel...a very derisive conversation. Its like Chevy vs. Ford in the US. Both will get the job done, both use similar tech to get the job done, but you soon find someone says this about that.

AMD - Cheaper than Intel on most products. Mostly attracting gamers due to the price vs. performance. The 3200+ listing means it performs similar to an Intel P4 running at 3200, it does not mean that is its clock speed. Overall, if you want performance at a good price, AMD should deliver. The downside to AMD is that it requires differe motherboards and driver sets than Intel, so you can not just get the same motherboard for an intel and drop an AMD into it and expect it to work. Because of the Chipset/Motherboard differences, they are not easy to compare

Intel - Solid performer that just switched to non-clock speed branding. The Pentium line is a long line of good Processors that are more expensive than their competitor. There are several types of Pentiums, from Celerons (Pentium cores) to Xeons. The current batch are now labeled as follows: Pentium M (Mobile, best power saving features depending on who you read) Pentium 4 (Desktop and direct competitor to AMD Athlons) Pentium D (New Dual Core pentiums, going against the new AMD Dual Core Athlons) Xeon (Server chip that goes against the AMD Opteron) Pentium 4 EE (Extreme Edition, a Xeon in a P4 wrapper, goes against the AMD Athlon 64FX chips)

Both sets are good, but you have to balance what you want, most Laptops are using the Pentium M because its better at power conservation, a good percentage of Desktops are using Athlon based chips because they are cheaper. What are you looking for?

Comparing and contrasting the Intel range to the AMD range has become a very complicated thing to do - nice job AphJN!

The fastest Pentium M laptop processor available (for quite a while now) is the Pentium M 2.0GHz CPU. This is what I buy for our top-end laptops at work. To compare, the 2.0GHz Pentium M Dells that I buy at work are much quicker than my 2.0GHz Intel Celeron Dell laptop that I bought recently at home. I would expect the 1.8GHz Pentium M to be a faster processor in a laptop than an AMD Athlon 2200+. But the Athlon should be cheaper.

In the UK at least, Intel is still the favourite for businesses but AMD's prices are making Athlons very popular in home PCs over the past couple of years.