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

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.

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.

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