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?"

Comments

Not enough info for a statement

[MarcoPon]

> 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?

No, it's probably only a testament on not showing enough info about the benchmark system/conditions to provide any useful technical data, but only marketing data.
Who know? Maybe the game was simply framerate limited by the similar integrated graphics chipset.

I'm not saying that the Pentium M isn't fast, or as fast as a desktop P4; only that probably that demo don't prove that.
Just my 2c.

Bye!

Performance of Pentium 4...

[SharpFang]

...with the fan attached or without?

I had the "pleasure" of performing a heavy number crunching on a P4 laptop. Luckily it was winter and one of the rooms in my house is unheated. Leaving the laptop there (temp. about +3C) with bottom lifted off the floor by some books to allow free access to the built-in fan prevented it from entering thermal throttling mode and allowed it to run at full speed...

It's a sad comment all right

[Spacejock]

I 'upgraded' from a P3-1 ghz to a P4-2.26 ghz and noticed hardly any difference. I upgraded from my P4 to an Athlon64 3400+ and it not only smokes it, it also has a variable clock speed which only ramps up when needed.

I've been a loyal intel user since the Pentium 90 came out, but after building several cheap and stable AMD systems for friends and family I took the plunge myself, and I'm more than happy.

Benchmark time

[Zeinfeld]

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.

Its time to do what we used to do back in 1990 before the Pentium arrived, run benchmarks to determine how fast the machine is.

The only interesting thing about using a game as a benchmark is if the thing will run. Its not unusual to find that a game simply does not run on a laptop.