Intel's Core 2 Duo processors

Yes, both Intel and AMD have power management features. The Pentium 4 has some power management too.

 

You can control the P-State transitions with RMClock, it is especially handy if you have a notebook.

I used it on my old machine to get an AMD64 3400+ to lower power than a 25W Turion (0.9V-1.2V) MT-40.

0.8V @ 4x200 and maximum of 1.2V @ 11x200

Got an extra hour battery life out of the machine

PS. Is everyone just going to ignore the 64-bit performance?

 

First of all winXP 64bit is extremely rare and unpopular.

Secondly others already answered to 64bit performance saying that Conroe also supports 64 bit and runs similarly fast in 64bit Windows.

 

It does run similarly fast but AMD64s run just as fast in 64-bit mode. Vista will be available as a mainstream OS in 64-bit in 2007. It is important to look at the future of a processor line when it comes to perfomrnace too. An AMD64X2 will be just as good as Conroe when Vista is released. AMD is lagging in 32-bit but they have been patiently awaiting the arrival of mainstream 64-bit where they are very fast indeed. Conroe is only 1.4% faster than AMD64X2 in that kind of environment. With AMD bringing new revisions to bear for improved 32 and 64-bit applications they'll leap ahead again. It is only a temporary gap in the performance and anyone seriously considering a long lasting machine would be fine with either. We are getting to a real competitive situation where both Intel and AMD will have products leapfrogging over each other. I think it is the end of the stagnant CPU market and we'll see some real changes.

 

Everything here is run in 64-bit environments with the exception of Worldbench - the results spread is very similar to what I was seeing with the few tests I ran.

 

None of the games there are 64-bit... Only:

SiSoft Sandra 2007.5.10.98 64-bit
POV-Ray for Windows 3.6.1 64-bit
Cinebench 9.5 64-bit Edition
LAME MT 3.97a 64-bit
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Edition
picCOLOR 4.0 build 561 64-bit
Unreal Tournament 2004 v3369 and 3369 64-bit Edition with trdemo1

And in most of those the performance is considerably closer than in 32-bit mode. Not quite as thorough as xbitlabs:



All 64-bit...

Conroe is still impressive, just people shouldn't worry too much about AMDs performance in future. Hell AMD64 architecture is 3yrs old!