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

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: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.