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

Damn it

[Toasty16]

The Centrinos are out and I had to buy a Dell Inspiron 8200 with a P4-M 1.80Ghz last Friday. I hate technology ;-)

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:Damn it

[agallagh42]

Should have got the IBM T40. Check out these specs from the CNET review:

"anywhere from 256MB to a big 2GHz of speedy 266MHz DDR SDRAM"

Whoa, 2GHz of RAM? So big and new, they had to change the units of measure :-)

link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks slashdot for providing a link to this fantastic full review!

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

Pentium M?

[Undaar]

What the hell happened to Pentiums V through CMXCIX?

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

[Hollinger]

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.

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

[Xerithane]

When people realize this, laptop speeds will go down to usable levels (1GHz will play DivX movies fine, and that's probably the most intensive thing you could possibly do well on a laptop). Until then, expect those laptops to continue tacking on more battery burning "features."

Well, what about people who do realize this. They realize that is what PDAs are for and such, and for a laptop they do want a powerhouse. I want a laptop that can run my entire development environment, quick compiles, while listening to mp3s and when I'm finished, reboot into windows and play some warcraft 3.

Remember, not everybody feels the same way as you. This is why their is market diversity.

Target market dissonance?

[lavalyn]

It appears the Centrino is a processor that actually could be practical, conserving battery power at the expense of computing power. As such, the market is of people that want more battery time, and are going to sacrifice computing power to do so.

Why do these laptops then contain such battery burning parts as large screens, CDRW/DVD drives, and weigh as much as 7lb?

When I saw the Sony Picturebook with Transmeta Crusoe processor, I was drooling. Not because it was a Crusoe processor, but because it was a computer that could do what mobile people need it to do, and do it for a long time, and be unobtrusive enough to put in my jacket pocket.

If you're going to get a portable computer but you're always going to be plugged in when using it, get a cheap ECS Desknote that doesn't come with a battery. If you worry a bit about battery time, get a normal mobile Pentium IV or Mobile Athlon. If you're insane about battery life, get a Crusoe. I don't see the middle ground between the last two.

Hey, stupid!

[barspin]

Yeah, I had hoped that we would make it on the review list, but alas, no such luck. Nice looking machines, though.

This will not get you a review unit any sooner. Review units are sent to news sites that actually test machines; not to a "news" site that would use the machine and then post a three-sentence blurb on, which would be followed by 400 comments about goatse.cx and SOVIET RUSSIA, and one on-topic post complaining about the price of the product reviewed.

Call this flamebait, troll, whatever, but it's reality: slashdot isn't classified in the realm of a legitimate news site. It's a BBS, plain and simple.

In summary: go buy your own fucking laptop, Hemos.

Re:Hey, stupid!

[fobbman]

One thing you are missing, barspin. If they did send /. a laptop for review, you KNOW that they'd post a story about it at LEAST twice. Call it the Taco 2 for 1 special.

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.

Centrino looks great

[stratjakt]

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).

Re:Fule Cells

[BeBoxer]

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.

anandtech review

[adpowers]

Anandtech also has their review up.

BusinessWeek on the new Centrino

[andy1307]

This is from the BusinessWeek subscription site.

Laptop Makers Don't Want This Intel Inside The new Centrino comes with a disappointing wireless chip

Too bad PC makers don't agree. Dell Computer Corp. (DELL ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ ), and other top manufacturers are eager to harness the extra power and efficiency of the new Pentium, but they are underwhelmed by Intel's wireless technology, which they say transmits data more slowly than those of rivals such as Broadcom (BRCM ).

What's more, notebook manufacturers perceive an ulterior motive behind Intel's Centrino launch. While Otellini says Intel is combining features in one package "so everything works [well] together," some PC makers fear Intel could boost prices if it were to become the sole supplier for most of a notebook's innards. And even if Intel didn't raise prices, PC makers say they'd prefer to continue buying components from numerous suppliers so they can better set themselves apart from competitors.

Re:weight?

[Schwamm]

Pussy. If a woman can do it, so can you.

*cough*

i am a woman.

and yet i fail to see what bearing that has on my desire for a 3 pound laptop.

Underclocking?

[Syncdata]

I've not part of the over clocking scene, nor the laptop scene, so I wouldn't know one way or the other, but would it be possible to take an already good laptop (battery life wise) such as one of these models with the centrino, and underclock it? I'd love a laptop, but I really only want one to access email and putz around with excel files on the move.
Is it even possible to jimjam with the bios settings, and lower the performance of the CPU? Would that even have an effect on battery life?

ibook vs these new guys

[ilsie]

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.

Re:Powerbook G4, irony

[notaspy]

"You Mac gayboys really ought to do your research. [snip] I don't sit at my computer all day using Photoshop filters. Look at games on Macs. They're pathetic."

That's a hoot, AC. You sit at your computer all day playing games and have the hubris to call Mac proponents "gayboys" (can you spell loser? Probably not, you'd probably spell it looser).

My guess is that most laptop purchasers buy laptops primarily to do useful work, not to play games. The story is about laptops, isn't it?

Once again, that's "loser" not "looser" or "loozer." It's a word you definitely should get used to hearing!

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

[winkydink]

- Len Bosack, Founder of Cisco Systems