Ques re: processors

cubix

Have been looking at different laptops and have noticed some have the M processors which are lower Ghz's but the same price as the higher Ghz's machines. I know these M processors are better on battery life as they dont get so hot/use as much juice but are they as fast as their bigger brothers ie: do they have more on board cache or are you just paying a higher price for more battery life?
Basically I am looking for a desktop replacement so battery life is not that important but instead would like good specs: fast processors/good graphics card etc. Some of the dell stuff is ok but you are quite limited on the graphics side of things

Thanks

Paulw

The M processors have a lot more than just a slower speed and a better battery consumption.

The M technology has a greater cache, many have wireless lan built in, and more.

In many cases they work just as well, if not sometimes better than the normal P4 chips.

mr_angry

The Centrino processors are excellent both in terms of low power consumption and the amount of work they get done per clock cycle. There was an interesting debate here a couple of months ago entitled "Intel still better than AMD?" (do a search for it). Someone posted an article from Anandtech that pretty accurately summarised the whole thing, but it was on page 5 or 6, so you might have to read through quite a lot of material to get to it.

The gist of it was that the P4 has a very long processing pipeline with very little work done throughout the process which allows them to reach very high clock-speeds. Unfortunately, it also generates quite a lot of heat. By contrast, the Centrino processor has a shorter pipeline which does far more work per clock cycle, but this means that they can't attain the same clock-speeds as the P4. However, the two are comparable in how much work actually gets done over the same amount of time.

All in all, the Centrino is a good chip, but Intel's marketing strategy has totally confused people. Hope that helped.

cubix

Thanks lads:D