Centrino M or Pentium 4?

[thetrilogy]

I AM computer literate, and that is why people always come to me with computer questions. But, I am not very useful with differing the two laptop versions offered as the Centrino M and Pentium 4.

I know the Centrino makes for a lighter and cooler computer, but the CPU speeds and BUS speeds are slower than Pentium 4. And I know the P4 are blazing fast but burn hot and are heavier.

I would recommend the Centrinos simply because of the lighter and cooler reference. Is there a hit in performance here? I don't usually recommend a gaming laptop. Just for audio, internet, Office. No video apps.

[Hurst2112]

I have read some stuff recently about the p4 being phased out of notebooks. the toll it takes on batteries and the heat is much more than the centrino. i also read that the p4 is going to be phased out of all computers next year or something like that.


clock speeds tend to be more of a selling point for consumers. why wouldn't a 1 ghz celeron be as fast as a 1 ghz p4 and so on. I would study benchmark tests for comparing centrinos with p4s. I know that my gateway that has a p4 eats battery life like crazy (just replaced with a new battery). the fan tends to turn on a lot as well.

i would suggest reading on cnet.com. i think that is where i heard about the p4 getting phased out and stuff. it's always been a great place to get test results and other reviews (as i am sure you might already know).

[ZXTT]

All this is off the top of my head, so hopefully I'm getting all the facts straight.

Centrino is the chipset/platform. The CPU is Pentium M, which is a descended from the P3 and designed specifically for mobile use.

Understand that the P4 is designed for clock-speed, that is, five+ years ago the Intel marketing people won a battle against the chip designers (or so it is said) and the resulting P4 was designed for clock-speed first, performance second. It gets less work done per clock than the Pentium M, or AMD's chips for that matter. The P4 also benefits from things like faster busses, to make up for the latency caused by the long pipeline, which is required to allow the high clock speeds. Hyperthreading, which you may not see on laptop P4s anyway, is also far more useful on the P4 than it would be on a P3 descendent, because Hyperthreading essentially makes use of wastefulness and latencies to run the extra thread - and the P4 has the most of those unappealing features. So, a Pentium M would not benefit as much from a high speed bus as a P4.

The P4 mobile computers, running a CPU designed to be as mobile-unfriendly as possible, have to turn a darned fan on every minute to cool themselves down. And as has been pointed out, the batteries suffer.

It's expected that eventually, new desktops will be running newer P3 descendents (with multiple cores in most cases) and that the P4 will turn out to be a dead-end.