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Phoney "Battle" between Intel and AMD misses the power point

What the real users think about the struggle for the title of "fastest PC processor" is "does it really matter?" - And what they actually want is a cool-running chip.

Who cares how fast a PC is? Apart that is, from Intel and AMD? Not most people.

Almost nobody could actually tell how fast their PC was if they were to compare the latest Intel P4 with the fastest rival chip, the Athlon, by watching the screen.

You need a sophisticated set of benchmarks, and you need to know how to run them, and you need expertise interpreting them, before you can say which is quicker. So why such a fuss?

It's simple enough, of course; Intel, which dominates the market, is showing itself to have missed the boat. This makes headlines! - it's nice to see the underdog triumph.

But in fact, AMD is winning a more important battle than just speed.

What really matters isn't whether you get 2% faster frames-per-second performance. What matters to this year's PC user is how hot it gets. The reason: heat equals battery power drainage. The smaller the chip, the fewer transistors, the cooler it runs. And AMD is winning that battle.

This year is going to be the year of the wireless access point. Over the next few weeks and months, headlines will dwindle to "just another mention" as public "hotspots" are established. And as people start to realise they can get out and about and still use their PCs, they will want to do so.

And the Intel notebooks will run out of battery first.

Never mind the benchmarks showing the number of graphics operations you can do; never mind the size of cache. Instead, look at what will happen when the P4 is put into a notebook computer.

Benchmarks for battery life on portable P4 chips are not yet available for the new "Northwood" variant of the processor. They'll come. When they come, the AMD portables wil easily outlast Intel portables with the same battery spec.

Most of us, of course, still won't care.

My own notebook runs at 600 MHz; it makes the 2 GHz Pentium 4 of last year look like lightning. I actually have a 2GHz machine in my office; but this article is written on the "slow" notebook.

Why? Simple! - because this is the one I can work on in every room in the house. In the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, I have a 512 kilobit per second Internet link over my wireless LAN.

One day, there will be a need for a faster processor than I have now; but right now, I need a lighter one, instead. Lighter means "smaller battery" and smaller battery means slower processor, smaller processor chip, cleverer screen technology.

A huge P4 notebook is about a sensible as a saloon car based on a 30 ton diesel truck engine. This time next year, perhaps, I'll be interested in one, and when the desktop processors are 64-bit 3 GHz chips, and I can put four of them on one motherboard, running in parallel, then there may be enough raw speed to make me jealous.

But right now, what I really want is a battery that lasts eight hours, not two. I want to spend more time away from the mains socket. What's the point of having a wireless Internet connection, if I'm tethered by cables to my electricity supply?