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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.
It's not so much battery technology as power consumption (and waste) of the battery. That huge 16" on some laptops sucks up watts left and right. That new P4-1.X Ghz pulls away power too. Oh, and don't forget about the GPU and the spindles for the drives.
Out of that list, the three that you could most obviously increase the power efficiency of are the ones where the masses want the latest and greatest. You could make a machine that runs for hours and hours, but it'd have a crappy little i810 graphics chip, and a p3, and a smaller display, which, honestly, is last century's technology, and not as appealing as the new gigahertz monsters.
My VAIO (6 month old GRX), when running at the "slow" speed of 1.1 Ghz with full backlight and 3Com WiFi X-jack card, runs for 2.5 -> 3 hours, depending on how many packets I fling out to the base station, and how much I pound on the hard drive.
If you want to know where your battery's going, it's the new "space warmer" feature that comes standard with most laptops.
Michael C. Hollinger
Seems Intel found a way to dramatically lower power consumption and heat without sacrificing too much CPU power.
I cant wait until we can get flex-atx or something like miniitx boards designed for these centrinos.
I want to put together little console-ish media players and gaming machines to plug into the TV, and VIA Edens offerings so far are just a little to gutless, and Shuttles spacewalker boards are great, but screaming CPU and case fans wont cut it.
I wonder how these things would cluster (yeah, imagine a beow...). Possibilities for my own personal little server farm without having to run another 150 amps of service to my PC room, and wont deafen me (a beowulf cluster of fans I dont need).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Fuel cells contain hydrogen and I would be pretty scared to carry around a laptop with that much energy potential in it.
I dunno if I would worry about it too much. First, fuel cells don't have to use hydrogen. A lot of different hydrocarbon fuels can be used, depending on the design of the cell. I believe that the new laptop fuel cells that have been announced will be using methanol (rubbing alchohol) for fuel. Second, you have to keep it in perspective. How many people carry around butane lighters? There is a significant amount of energy in one of those, yet they seem to be remarkably safe. I've never heard of a catastrophic lighter accident, although I'm sure it happens. No reason to assume that a fuel cell "tank" wouldn't be at least as safe.
I have to say, being a lifelong Windows user (I had a stint with Macs briefly, 10 years ago in high school yearbook class, pagemaker and what not) I was getting quite fed up with my 9 pound, 1 hour, Sony Vaio AMD laptop. So last week I sold it and went out and bought a sleek little 12" ibook. Best purchase I've ever made. After the initial learning curve with OS X (why the heck isnt Ctrl+C working? Wait, what's this weird little symbol key?) I am really digging the ibook. It's so beautiful, has great battery life, and does everything I'd ever need in a laptop. I love that I can ssh into my colo box without having to download putty. Little stuff like that.
Anyways, long story short, if I had to do it again now with all these T&L windows laptops out, I would still go with the ibook.