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64-bit Laptops Reviewed
prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech reviews current mega-notebooks, which are powerful enough to become a desktop replacement. Among the laptops reviewed there's one with 64-bit AMD Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz clock rate) - the Voodoo Envy m:855."
Very nice. Sun 64 bit Laptops...I'd buy one too, however, look at the rest of the specs. 500mhz and 256mb RAM hardly makes it worth $3,000.
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Basically it looking like this are some kick ass machine in the power area with fast CPU's, Inbuilt RAID good graphics. However they get a bit to warm for comfort and way a tone. Would like to have one, need to be a little bit cheaper.
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And the hard drive. 2.5" hard drives are miserably slow. That's one of the big factors in the laptop machines I've owned, especially for disk-intensive apps.
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the real selling point (at least for the spooks amoung us )is the magnesium case....
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First 64bit laptop? What about the "Tadpole Alphabook" - i believe that was the first 64bit laptop, but i could be wrong... i believe it came out in the first half of the 90`s and use a 166 or 233mhz 64bit Alpha EV4 processor.
Also tadpole produced HP PA-RISC laptops (precisionbook) and ultrasparc laptops, altho they came much later, they still predate the G5 by a few years.
On a side note, if anyone has a working alphabook for sale.. get in touch with me!
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Anandtech has had a review for a week or so:
part 1
part 2
their conclusion:
"We recommend this beautiful notebook to those looking to tackle the best of desktop gaming, high-end multimedia users, and even those looking for an alternative to the very popular Pentium 4 desktop replacement notebook, like those that are ODM through Clevo (Sager/Eurocom/Hypersonic). At the moment, this is the only notebook on the market to use a processor from the Athlon 64 family, and we are sure there will be more to follow. We are particularly excited to hear about AMD?s upcoming mobile Athlon 64 processor, which should breathe a breath of fresh air that mobile systems have yet to fully appreciate"
later,
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Right on. Centrino notebooks (like IBM's T40 even) are able to for 5-6hrs without breaking a sweat -- and the T40 is a full-fledged desktop killer.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I've been drooling over Hypersonic's Laptops for quite a long time now, and I find it very hard to believe that either of these companies have the first Athlon 64 laptop (which Hypersonic has had basically since the Athlon Mobile 64 was announced) or the first RAID array in a laptop, which Hypersonic has had for a long time in their Aviator GX8 series.
Way too many "journalists" see something like that and go "whoa, that must be the first time that's ever been done." without ever looking into it.
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That is very untrue. That (larger address space) is only one limitation of the 32-bit processors that you can ignore when using a 64-bit processor. The ability to natively do calculations with numbers larger than 4294967295 is a good plus for many types of applications. The lack of memory is certainly not a reason why the 64-bit processor would not be "worthwhile."
Well, you can get >2GB virtual address space with Intel already (you can get up to 4GB with the right kernel options). Heck, with x86 you can already get >4GB physical memory. That being said, if you are in it for the virtual memory, than you probably don't want to be using a laptop anyway, as the disc performance will be brutal.
The large virtual memory address space is nice, but your code will likely actualy perform worse than 32-bit code that cleverly uses smart pointers to manage your IO.
Still, you are right. As I said, there are some minor benefits to having a 64-bit CPU even if you are limited to 1GB of memory. However, I suspect for most folks the extra memory consumption of 64-bit code (and the resulting swapping and cache misses) will likely outweigh the benefits substancialy. It's like having a 1000hp engine hooked up to a drive train that can only handle 200hp.
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Okay... let's see if this works better...
1: They didn't do ANY 64bit tests 2: The A64 was running on winxp pro not winxp 64. This would have been a much better comparison. 3: The memory bandwidth description is WRONG. the via k8t800 chipset actually has support for 2 hypertransport busses from the DDR to chip, because the chipset was designed for the opteron not the a64. Meaning that it's chip dependant how much memory pipeline there is.(I wonder if the laptop would handle a64fx chip which would mean an 800MHZ pipeline, the chipset does) This is glossed over (the nforce3 150 on the other hand has only one, because it's designed for the a64).
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