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Laptop Pentium IIIs
jued0001 writes "A new Pentium III for Laptops running at 600 Mghtz is being released. Once called "Geyserville," now known as SpeedStep, it runs at 600 Mgthz when running on AC, but drops to 450 Mghtz when running on a battery. "
But it reminds me way too much of those days when you had the 8088 with the turbo button to go up to 10.77 mhz. I wonder how much power will really be saved by slowing down the proc that much. I think I would rather have the option myself so that if I needed the extra speed while on battery I could have it. But Im not a high paid Intel engineer:)
I am 31337 or something.
They've been hyping this for a long time. Wasn't it supposed to slow the processor when the system was running low on power? There've been laptops that do this for quite a while now. In fact, there was a discussion on the kernel mailing list about it a while back. Here's a link to the discussion. Personally, I don't see it being that big of a deal. My take on it is that it's just an excuse to charge more for portable processors again now that they've been forced to lower prices by competition by AMD.
Doesn't the fact that Linux calls the HALT instruction in its idle loop make dropping the processor speed irrelevant? That should save as much power and heat as possible without compromising performance.
I believe that this is the reason that the heat-sensitive fan on my laptop stays off when running Linux, but goes on with Windows.
... and frankly, I think its a waste. Sure, its nice to be able to do quick audio editing on the fly out in the field (using Sound Forge on the train or bus to edit just-recorded audio does rock, I'll admit), but for the most part I find it hard to understand why laptop manufacturers insist on putting more and more processing power into portable computers.
... dare I say it ... "window" into that luggage on the road with us...
I'd be quite happy with a 400mhz laptop with good *connectivity* options - if someone came out with a P2/400 that was fairly simple in the performance ratio department, but had 128k radio connectivity within a 4 to 6 mile radius back to a home base unit I could put on my network, I'd be in total geek heaven.
I don't understand why this isn't more of an issue for people these days - I guess in a nation of commuters (I walk to work every day), this is not as important as having the 'latest and greatest processor' to cart back and forth, but I'm hoping that in the coming year or so we'll start to see more innovation in the WAN department for portable computer users than we will in processor designs...
In fact, if laptops *DEVOLVED* into simple video/screen/mouse interfaces with extremely good spread spectrum radio connectivity back to a home base unit that could be connected to a Monster P3/1Ghz system, that would be *ideal*.
Why bother engineering to take all that luggage with you, when we could just engineer to leave the luggage at home and just take a
These new wireless WedPad type devices are more and more becoming an attractive occupation of time and geek attention, in my book... They'll surely evolve to something closely approximating what I described above. Hopefully, anyway.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I can assure you all that this is a nice feature for most laptop users. I use a PowerBook G3 Series (Macintosh laptop), that has this feature. I can chooose my power settings to give me the mix of performance and battery life that I want. As most of my work on the road is glorified text editing (scripting/developing), I let my processor cyle down, but keep the screen at full energy (punctuation is hard to read on a dimmed screen in high glare environs..).
I get to keep working for an hour longer on a single battery. And this does bring up one more note on this, whenevery you think about the battery life figures now, remember that they are baseing this on the most power-conserving settings...
I can understand if you need a certain ammount of power but the type shouldn't matter in the slightest.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Ooooh, the new Geezerite processor. sounds like what geologists will find when excavating the Intel prefab plant about 3 millenia from now with nanobots. "Wow, it's unbelievable - they actually used *silicon* to power their computers!"
I reawlly don't believe such statements that having variable temperature would cause anything but varing Mhz ratings.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
A better solution would be short-range base units scattered 200 feet apart in all civilized areas (perhaps on top of all light posts) that have a fibre connection to the internet. Thus lower-power radios can be used, and since there would be only at max 200 notebooks in a 200 foot radius to one of these stations, there would be plenty of bandwidth for all! Then you would just securely VNC into your home computer for all the juicy processing tasks you need to do...
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We have a trade off then. You have the high performance if hooked to A/C. So... it is a not so easy to use (ergonomics wise) home system. If you take it out on the town however it has about the same speed as all a standard high end laptop. Did I miss something here?
The wages of sin are unreported and back taxes are hell to pay.
...they have their role, and they can rock at it, but they are not the best system to replace a whole desktop computer, not because of their cost or power, but because of... their size.
the *interface* to the laptop, what you use to work with it, the keyboard, the screen, the mouse/equivalent, are all components that suffer through miniaturisation, due to their having to interface with our eyes and hands. small, unresponsive keyboards (still using the unwieldy qwerty layout! a disaster, sizewise), poor substitutions for the mouse, and a small screen, all hinder its usage.
coding on it is passable, non-type-intensive applications are better, but anything demanding accurate mouse-control is difficult, graphic design nigh-on impossible. the laptop should not be performing any of these tasks though - by implication, the environment it should be used in is quite unsuitable to these sorts of developments - it should be used on the move.
on the train/bus/etc while commuting, in a restaurant on a lunch break, so on and so forth - a non-work environment. as such it should be used primarily for supplemental tasks... anything from catching up on email to reading documents, filing things, noting down ideas, and so on and so on.. work that can then consolidate the work on the regular computer.
this is probably what has lead to the increasing popularity of palmtop computers - they offer a similar range of functions as detailed above, but are all the more portable. people are finding laptops unwieldy for anything more. it is likely people could make more use of a portable computer than they can get from a palmtop, but in its current incarnation, the laptop is unable to fulfil this role to any great extent.
ideally, the ultimate goal would be to produce a "portable computer" (i refrain from using the term laptop here) whose interface system is not an adaptation of the desktop computer's, but rather one made for the job, ie working on the move. speculation here could end up in the fantastic, but the technology, from voice-activated commands through eye-tracking pointers to thought-control, can't be too many years away.
Fross
Whoa, now there's a troll!
My haiku comment is deep.
Won't be minus one.
... then it must be the wave of the future:
:P
http://www.apple.com/ibook/airport.html
Won't be long before this becomes a commodity in the PC market, and when that happens, as all new technologies that enter the PC realm, it'll become faster, cheaper, lighter, and more and more powerful within a very short period of time...
So
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
a software hardware solution that will mantain processor usage at 100%. What I mean is when you look at the proc utilisation on a typical system, it hovers at around 10-20 % most of the time and occasionally in small bursts it goes up to 100%. So in this scenario what'd be ideal is that the s/w throttles the processor speed so that proc utilisation always remains at 100%. As in if the systems not doing too much stuff at any given time slow the proc just enough so that proc utilisation goes up to around 90-100% and once the speed up the proc once utilisation reaches 100% and keep speeding it up until you reach peek speed. Does that make sense? I am thinking you could apply such algorithms to other parts of the system too. i.e. throttle the bus speed the video card etc..
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second F for this term. - Prof. A.S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix,
My six-year-old laptop has a full size keyboard, as does my new one. Among the well over 150 portable computers I own, there are indeed some with very substandard screens, keyboards, etc. There are some with even worse features, though. You pick whats important to you when you pay your money.
My laptops work great in those situations, but I am not limited to "supplemental tasks" -- because my laptop is my main computer, I am fully functional where ever I might be. I don't have to worry about jotting down notes to update something later, I can update it right then and there. Heck, with my wireless modem, I can update a web page, upload it, and view it off the net without leaving the coffee shop.
When I get somewhere where I work a lot (such as my home office, or my main client,) I plug into a docking station connected to a MS Natural Keyboard, a Logitech Trackman Marble, and a 17 inch monitor. For trips, I have a bag packed and ready to go with a network card, serial card, another trackman, a ballpoint mouse, and various keyboard and monitor cables.
The point is, where ever I am, I don't have to sacrifice. I have the best of all worlds, instead of sacrificing for a good machine some of the time!
Again, I think you are flat out wrong. Perhaps you find them unwieldy, but from what I've seen, laptops are replacing desktops in the corporate world left, right, and center. Fifteen years ago, I was about the only person I knew who owned a portable computer. Today, it doesn't surprise me to see two or more other people on the train with me working on a notebook -- at 9pm, going against the commute.
I have no problem carrying a large laptop -- it beats driving somewhere to walk on a treadmill the way people do -- but there are smaller, lighter ones that still have full-sized keyboards and screens.
Of course, portable computers aren't for everyone. My wife doesn't use hers anywhere nearly as often as I think she should. But for an awful lot of people, they are the future.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Wanna place a bet on that? Portable computers have been around for over 25 years -- I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, my experience has been just the opposite -- they are replacing desktops like crazy.
Well, not everyone does 3-D rendering all day; you might be surprised to find that 90% of the population can get by just fine with a 450mhz processor. Meanwhile, portability -- being able to work where ever, whenever you want -- is far more important than cutting a few milliseconds off that spell check.
As for cost, the relative price of a laptop to its comparable desktop counterpart is much closer than it was 10 years ago, and it continues to drop. In a few years, the price will be very nearly the same (but your desktop computer will come with an LCD screen.)
Wander down to the airport some time and check out how many folks you see waiting for flights with their laptops out. Take the bus some time during the rush hour and look around. Have lunch in Palo Alto or Mountain View and see what's on the menu. Heck, take a look in a CompUSA ad some Sunday and count the number of laptops versus desktops shown! I think you'll find that laptops are definitely not disappearing.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
When did "Mghtz" become a widely accepted abbreviation for "Megahertz"? The standard is "MHz".
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I'd trade 1/2 the speed for twice (how about 4x?)
the battery life.
In fact, everything else being equal (ram and disk capacity for instance), I'd really enjoy something like a P200 with a much improved battery life. 2-4 hours doesn't cut it. Give me 72 hours on a charge!!
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Bah, its a 450 megahertz laptop with a special AC adapter turbo mode. Next they'll start marketing a laptop that has a full size screen and keyboard and extra drive space when connected to a desktop.
Someone will probably spill their jolt on themselves for me saying this, but take a look at the Powerbook G3. I'm really happy with mine, it's close to a portable equivilent for my P3 500 I'm on right now, the best part is the high power with low power consumption. If I turn the power saving stuff on it's still usable but will get me about 4 hours on a full battery. The screen is big and bright and comes with plenty of RAM, it also has 8 megs of video memory which is great for when I have it hooked up to my 19" monitor. MacOS probably wouldn't be an OS of your choice but I'm pretty sure you could get Yellow Dog or LinuxPPC working on one pretty easily. The 98 G3 300 is pretty nice from what I hear too (I have the 99 333). If you have the cash you can also get a Virtual PC card which works REALLY well in my experience.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That's what I did 6 years ago. Six years was stretching it a bit, but you get the idea. My new laptop will hopefully last a while as well.
Personally, I would recommend focussing on (in order of importance):
Well, I went for a ChemBook 7400 which is one of the laptops that Linux Laptops used to sell. (Unfortunately, they stopped taking orders before I got mine.) There is also a page on running Linux on an ASUS 7400 (which is the OEM version of the ChemBook). For more general info, check out the Linux Laptop page.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Yes, once the processor hits the HALT instruction, the gates stop transistioning between the on and off states, where the power is consumed. When these logic gates stop, they just act like capacitors and sit with its charge. When the keyboard, timer, etc., or other interrupt is activated, the processor starts executing instructions until the end of the interrupt routine and executes another HALT at the end.
My laptop consumes 33 watts at full throttle, but consumes about 12 watts throttling the HALT instruction due to other electronics. You can watch how much your laptop consumes by splicing an ammeter and voltmeter from the power supply. Power in watts is voltage multiplied by current.
If you have the wattage, you can express this as kilowatt hours and calculate the cost of running your laptop each month for nonstop use. Its usually 8 cents per kilowatt hour or 2 cents for the industrial rates. Running my laptop while chewing on CSC keys in the background cost me $1.90 a month.
One thing I didn't mention was that with laptops, getting a good vendor is a little more important than with a desktop. If your video card (for example) goes bad on a desktop, you can chuck it and get a new one. Not so with a laptop. That's why I paid a little more for the Chembook name, rather than getting the ASUS version cheaper from some no-name little dealer.
512MB RAM seems like it's way more than anyone could ever need, but I seem to remember people saying that about 64K not too long ago... 8^) Same goes for disk space. In theory, though, disk space should only be limited by available drives -- is there an actual BIOS limit or something at 75GB?
A 15" monitor sounds dreamy, but be sure it's something you want to haul around. I'm 6', 280lbs, and use to carry one of those 40lb suitcase compaq-types, so it wouldn't bother me, but it's probably bigger than my wife. YMMV.
The touchpad is important, but 90% of the time my hands are on the keyboard (I do COBOL programming mostly) and most of the rest of the time I use an external Trackman Marble. My mobile work is mostly typing (web pages, journal, e-mail, etc.) so the keyboard is far more important to me.
Check out the compatibility of the components -- video card, etc. I've not loaded Linux on my new one yet (where are those damn CD's?) but one of the reasons I picked this model was because of the Linux support available.
I've had it running under MS-DOS/Win3.11, Win98, GEM/TOS (Atari ST), and the MacOS. I'm sure I could use it with Linux if I had the time. I know of others who have used it with handhelds as well.
Basically, it's a hayes-compatible modem with a funny dialing string. The only problem I ever had was my Win3 dialer that didn't think "777**ppp" was a valid phone number. Note that for an extra $5/month, you can prepend a 9 and dial any landline modem. (I use this all the time to dial into client sites.) Check out some of my experiences with it.
There are other, similar services, but most of them don't seem as simple or as well thought out as Ricochet. Check to see if a University in your area has coverage: I was travelling through Oregon one time and was surprised to get a signal. Turned out the hotel was right next to the Univ/OR which was wired for ricochet.
Failing that, get a bunch of your friends to send inquiries in the hope that there's enough potential business in your area to get them to set up a network.
I will have mine, btw, forever. When I die, there'll be a little antenna sticking up out of the ground by my headstone -- that'll be my Ricochet modem so I can update my web page from the other side... 8^)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
The 15.4" screen runs at 1280x1024 (or something) which is probably higher than I would want to run it (I like 1024x768, but I could probably be convinced otherwise.) Laptop screens usually can't switch to a lower resolution -- it's a function of the hardware. Check out that screen in person before you buy! The same goes for the keyboard and mouse!
On a desktop, you can toss the keyboard/mouse/monitor and get yourself a nice MS Natural KB (one of the MS products I like, but they didn't invent it!), a Logitech Trackman Marble, and an 17"/19" NEC or MAG monitor (or whatever you fancy), but it's not so easy with a laptop on the road. You also have to weigh how much you'll be using it on the road versus at a desk where you can use an external KB/mouse/monitor.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I know they have WashDC covered. I'm surprised they're not working on Boston, actually. Keep an eye on them, and let 'em know you're interested and they may show up in your area.
Sorry, I was being unclear. The $5/mo goes to ricochet so you can use the ricochet modem to call regular modems. That is, you can sit in the park with your laptop and ricochet modem and dial into any modem-equipped system, such as a BBS, internal network, or mainframe/minicomputer. The $5 covers their cost of an outgoing line, basically.
Aw, shucks. I'd settle for one of those Inspirons... 8^)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.