Centrino Laptops Reviewed

Jeff Mancuso writes "CNET seems to be the first out with full reviews of the new Centrino Pentium M laptops. The performance looks solid, the features are great, designs are thin and battery life runs up to 4-7 hours on these machines." Yeah, I had hoped that we would make it on the review list, but alas, no such luck. Nice looking machines, though.

Comments

I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

... why there's no direct link to the article. I mean tomorrow the cnet.com frontpage could have changed completely, couldn't it?

Anyway here's the 'overview' as they call it:

http://www.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-8-20926222-1 .h tml?tag=ld

That link won't make sense in the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

For when this article gets moved off Cnet's front page, here's a direct link.

And just so you won't mod me up, here's a link to goatse.cx

Article Link

[HaloZero]

For you lazy bastards.

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-8-209262 22-1.html?tag=ld

Enjoy. Oh, and, to be honest, I'm happy with my new 12" PowerBook G4 - It does everything I want, and then some. :-D

Battery life

[tmark]

Why hasn't it advanced much compared to just about every other technology in a laptop ? To me, low battery life and low weight are THE most important characteristics of any laptop, I might use, but we had laptops running for 2-3 hours 5-7 years ago, which is still where most laptops are at. Here it seems the Centrino ekes out its long life through advances in the CPU, not through better batteries.

A recent Sony Vaio notebook I just got, while a lovely machine, lasts *maybe* 1 1/2 hours when all the consumption-related options are turned way down. Plug in the wifi card and it's borderline useless.

So why hasn't battery life advanced significantly ? Are we already at a theoretical limit of battery performance ? Or is battery performance improving, but just managing to keep pace with ever-increasing power-consumption ?

Re:Battery life

[rgmoore]

There are two reasons that battery life isn't getting better. One is that there's an inherent competetion between improved battery life and improved features. Whenever somebody comes up with an improvement in energy storage, it can be used either to give you more time or to feed more cool stuff, like more powerful processors, extra storage devices, or a nicer screen. The competetion from cool stuff has a tendency to keep the life from improving as much as you might like.

Equally important, there are serious physical limits to the amount of energy that a battery can hold. For a given mass of battery, the total energy storage is limited by the chemical properties of the materials you can use in the battery. Since those properties are reasonably well known, and people have been making batteries for a couple hundred years now, most of the possible advances have already been made. There just isn't much space for improvement once you've switched to the highest energy materials available. The only way to get radically higher energy density than is currently available is by switching to something other than batteries, like fuel cells.

Re:Battery life

[larien]

Batteries have been around for decades and we probably have eked out most of the performance from them. However, I did read something in the last few days about some advances in lithium batteries which may help out.

In essence, batteries use well known chemistry/physics which we know a lot more about than making CPUs. Added to this, there are certain hard limits in this based on the chemistry/physics involved. We're probably already fairly near them using current battery techniques. The advances above may help out, but until they've delivered, we're stuck at current battery technology.

To be honest, another approach should be to make CPUs equivalent to 500MHz PIIs; it's enough for most things (word processing, email) and should be able to be designed at a very low power consumption.

Re:Battery life

[tungwaiyip]

Unfortunately when faced the choice between performance and battery most vendor bias toward performance. I am a programmer spending a lot of time on commute train. 3+ hour is what I demand. I spend more time on text editor and web browser than any other thing I don't really need high speed in that circumstance. Unfortunately with CPU speed turned low (Intel SpeedStep?) I still get only around 2 hours, much less than my PIII.

Re:Battery life

[xombo]

My 600 Mhz VAIO only gets about 30-50 min of battery power, just playing mp3's and surfing wireless. With no wireless I get about 1 hour if I am very lucky. I think x86 just plain sucks in terms of power consumption. I got a powerbook now, and it's battery life is about 3.5 hours and that isn't just playing mp3's, that is using the internet, photoshop, VNC, terminal, SSH, chat, etc. I don't see why people put up with Wintel laptops.

AMD's answer: Mobile athlons with 1watt(!)

[egghat]

12 new Athlon Mobile models, which will go down to 1 volt core voltage and use not more than 1 watt (!).

Check here

The 1 watt number is from a Heise article.

Bye egghat.

Re:AMD's answer: Mobile athlons with 1watt(!)

[cheezedawg]

That 1 watt number is crap- thats the minimum power consumption, which isn't really a useful number. According to Cnet, the maximum is 25 watts, and AMD is still working on a chip that only uses 15 watts.

Re:Damn it

[robinthecandystore]

Just call dell and ask them if you can change it. They'll ask you to pay the price difference, but they'll allow this. I did it a month ago. I wasn't really happy with the inspiron laptop I got so I rang and eventually (within an hour or so) got them to agree to change it for a latitude c640 I just paid the difference.

Except the Dells, where 802.11a/b/g is an option

[raygundan]

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-405-2090 6166-2.html?tag=rating

It's not technically a "Centrino" laptop anymore, if you pick that option, just a "Pentium M." But it's the same damn laptop with a Dell 802.11a/b/g card in it instead of the Intel card.

Re:Target market dissonance?

[Shenkerian]

I think the middle ground between the Pentium 4 and the Crusoe is high performance and reasonable battery life. By one speed test I read about (I think PC World's), a 1.6 GHz Pentium M-based notebook surpassed a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 desktop in some benchmarks.

The Pentium M is really just a much-improved Pentium 3.. 400 MHz FSB, 1 MB on-die cache, and the P4's better branch prediction. All with a better life of up to 7 hours. If you want real performance and can do only 5 - 7 hrs instead of 10 - 12, the Pentium M is much more appealing than anything Transmeta has out right now.

I think once PC manufacturers "get it," we'll start seeing more small, 1" thick, yet powerful notebooks, like IBM's new T, with 4 - 5 hrs battery life. Apple's huge hardware lead in the mobile market will be significantly diminished by Intel's (and AMD's, for that matter) new offering. Fortunately, I prefer my iBook for other reasons, like the OS.

anandtech review

[adpowers]

Anandtech also has their review up.

what accounts for the performance differences?

[e4liberty]

The performance of these machines varies quite a bit. The top performers are described and benchmark results are here.

What accounts for this range of performance. All four machines have the same processor, clock, memory speed, bridge chip, GPU, disk speed, etc.:

Windows XP Professional; 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 32MB; [many]GB 5,400rpm [drive]

Is it all in the firmware settings?

"It's never a good day to buy a computer"

[winkydink]

- Len Bosack, Founder of Cisco Systems

It's a gimmick

[ThresherGDI]

Centrino is a marketing gimmick and a gimmick only. I'm sure the parts are just fine, but the whole setup is a marketing ploy.

Each of the seperate parts of Centrino are very good. The new processor should do wonders for battery life. The new wireless solution should be halfway decent, but it's a commodity part. The motherboard should be solid, as usual for intel. Individually, these parts are worth more than their sum.

In order to have the Centrino label, the OEM must use the specified Intel mobo, the intel WiFi part, and the Pentium M. If you have a large, paranoid company like mine, you do NOT want the WiFi part. Thankfully, this part is optional, but the computer can no longer be marketed as a Centrino and the OEM loses a certain amount of co-marketing dollars. This is bad for the OEM, okay for the end user (they get what they want), and bad for intel since they don't get to capitalize on all the marketing dollars they spent huckstering the Centrino name.

For a personal user, say that I want 802.11g or a different video subsystem. If I change out the WiFi portion, the product is no longer Centrino. From my understanding, intel is also taking this stance on using anything other than the included intel graphics subsystem, so if I need a more powerful graphics solution (for games, CAD, 3D rendering, etc) I lose the Centrino label. It is also not clear that you can even USE non-intel graphics. The Register mentioned that ATi was denied a license. Once again, this is bad for the OEM, good for the customer, bad for intel.

The only time this pays off for intel or the OEM is if the end user buys a stock Centrino unit. That may be a considerable number of people. But my bet is that there are plenty more individuals or corporate customers that only want a part of the package. Additionally, there will be many individuals that will be confused by the new label and not understand that there are other choices available that will give them either more power, or less if that's what they need.

So, what was the point of putting this package together in the first place? It limits choice, it doesn't pay off in many situations, and it will confuse the customer.

I guess intel figures if they can establish a brand that encompasses the guts of a laptop, they can control the laptop market. People will ask for a Centrino the way that they ask for Pentiums, regardless of their true merits.

Why doesn't intel just slap a chassis and LCD on them and be done with it? They seem intent on making laptops. There will be little or no product variation between OEMS.