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Centrino Mobile Equals Desktop Pentium 4 in Speed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the six-on-one-hand dept.

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?"

2 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Hyperthreading? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    So the game played the same on both machines? Well, I bet it was due to the hyperthreading holding the game back on the desktop machine. As far as I have been able to tell, most games are still written to be single threaded which does not take advantage of hyperthreading and thus works better in a non-hyperthreaded environment. I suppose you could say that the game is using 50% of the clock speed (roughly) while the OS and other applications get to use the other half but then that's still not a fair comparison for the two machines. In my opinion, it seems only that people/companies that really really care about their product and it's efficiency implement multiple threads for improvements in multi-cpu or hyperthread environments... sadly, it seems that those people/companies are always making some developer or system administration tools. While this is a really good thing for the average geek... it's not good for the home consumer who so badly wants to play that crappy EA title at full performance (I have yet to see a multi-threaded EA title).

    Just so I have some backup as to what I've just said, I have a 3.4ghz P4 with hyperthreading enabled... it doesn' matter what game I play (always at the maximum settings) I never use more than about 54% CPU (and I estimate that 4% over 50 is the OS and/or other programs running at the same time).

    So... is this a fair comparison at all?

  2. Re:What's the difference? by rpozz · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Centrion isn't just the processor, it's a Pentium M, an Intel chipset on the motherboard, and an Intel wireless chipset.