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Centrino Mobile Equals Desktop Pentium 4 in Speed
Spy Handler writes "On Wednesday during the launch of its new Sonoma Centrino Mobile, Intel put on a demonstration running a video game on a laptop. It matched the performance of a high-end Pentium 4 desktop running the same game, declared Intel. The contenders were a laptop sporting a 2.13 GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB RAM, and the Alviso chipset versus a desktop with a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 1GB RAM, and the Grantsdale chipset. Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?"
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
I think it's a testament to the fact that whatever game they were running doesn't bottleneck at the CPU. Most video games are not CPU-limited beyond a GHz or two.
Centrino is fine and dandy, but I still want a little bit more speed than that. I want a Pentium M, but I also want to know how it really is vs that desktop. I would really like to have the fastest thing for a new laptop, as judged by experienced people. So Intel, come on and test all your chips against that 'fast' desktop!
FYI, Centrino is the same thing as Pentium M. Centrino just means you bought a laptop with a Pentium M processor and Intel's wireless chipset. bundled together. Why, oh why does Intel insist on giving everything some crappy marketing name and confusing customers?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
That's part of the beauty of the Pentium M: most of the notebooks based on it are in the 6lbs or less range, and I've yet to see one with a battery life of less than four hours.
As I had mentioned in a previous comment, the front side bus speed is the biggest limiting factor on Pentium M processors. The day we see an 800MHz FSB Pentium M is the day the direct MHz comparisons will apply (i.e. 1.8GHz P-M vs. 1.8GHz A64). Even the Tom's Hardware Guide review of the new Sonoma chipset for P-M shows fairly marginal gains and proves the FSB is the limitation, PLUS they do the stupid thing here and put in DDR-2 which does little for performance but increases system costs.
It isn't just an issue of clock speed, but also CPU core voltage. Throttling the clock speed from 2Ghz to 400Mhz can also be combined with a lower CPU voltage. So you are not only running the CPU slower, but also supplying it with a lower voltage.
I don't know about P4, but on AMD systems this allows for the CPU fan to completely stop when the CPU is idle (on desktop systems).
Here is a link to a benchmark that show that intel might be right.
This benchmark shows that a Pentium M 2.3 (Yes it is overclocked) is as fast as a AMD Athlon64 FX-53 (2.4 GHz) in many games