Celeron and Pentium 4 and Pentium M?

[tony3]

Hey guys, on my quest for a laptop I basically have come to this problem. My brother is a computer science engineer major and I talked to him tonight about it. Basically, first off, I will be using this computer for music, internet, aim, and word processing. How much of a difference is there between 2 exact computer but one has a celeron 2.8 and one has a pentium 4 2.8? Will I notice a differnce? My next question is, what is this whole pentium M buisness. Just browsing dell and hp this is what the majority of their notebooks have. It has a low processor speed, but I know that doesn't always mean how fast it is. These things are like 1.6 ghz but still really expensive. So what exactly is pentium M? I have looked around but not found much good information.

Thanks

[teufelhunden]

Pentium M, IIRC, are their cool running and low power consuming chips that are made for smaller laptops.

If all you're going to be doing is general, run of the mill computing like you described, the Celery will be fine. As long as you don't venture into the photo/video/sound editing area or gaming [among others], you'll be fine without an L2 cache.

[tony3]

I'll also be watching dvd's on there if that means anything at all. What if I wanted to put a few games on it though? Like sims 2 or HL-2?

[BronzeDarkAngel2]

Ok dude... Basicly... Think of it as a highway.... Pen. 4 is a 4 lane highway... Celeron is a 2 lane.... If you wanna play HL-2 on a laptop you better get a P4... Or you're gonna fry your chips with the celeron... Also, Alot of people say they have super high speed internet and such... If your computer cant prossess the data its getting its gonna slow down.. So... You have a choice... 4 lane highway... or 2... I'd do 4....

[teufelhunden]

Um, today's processors are all fast enough to deal with the almighty strain of web browsing. You aren't gonna 'fry' crap by running HL2 or Sims2. I'd wager he could run it fine if he dropped the graphical settings to low.

[Steelrat]

The Penitum M, or Centrinos, are fairly different from the regular pentiums, so comparing the clock speed isnt a good indicator of performance. From what I understand, a M 1.8 is roughly equivilant to a P4 3.0. One of the ways they boost the Centrino's performance is by having a large (2 meg I think) L2 cache. I also think the Centrino does not have a floating point unit, though I may be wrong there. I do know the Centrino cannot handle large calculations as well as the P4, so for gaming and CAD the P4 is superior.

[bornl33t]

I recently had to do some research on the matter too and here's what I came up with
The pentium 4 (now had 2 different processors to choise from, the more expensive is obviouly the fastest and just another way for you to trump your friends laptop). The P4 with HT is as benchmarked by Tom's hardware the faster of the availible prossesors. It really is though to be for "desktop replacements. Which means just that; your laptop can do everything a regular desktop can... only it's small. The two biggerest disadvantages with this is. 1.) Heat, you'll burn your britches IF you do try to use it on your lap and 2.) Battery, there are few laptops with p4 HT processors that can last much longer then 2 hours.

The pentium M is more or less a P4 with a regulator on it. It only runs as hard as you are demanding it. Intel claimed it was performance wise the same as the P4 chips but tom's hardware put that to rest. The PM is infact slightly slower. The PM's key feature was to save battery power, which it does. As advertised by many companies, laptops so 1-3 hours increased runtime with a PM vs the P4. But with this feature comes a price tag.

The Centrino is a cooler running chip altogether. It uses less power, thus 1.8mhz is actually pretty fast and since it doesn't warm up as fast is needs less fans so laptops don't power fans AND can be made smaller.

The Celeron was designed to catch anyone that didn't wanna shell out for one of the above. It's lacking an L2 cache and is althoger a slower processor.



I wann point out that I spent a considerable about of time looking for what inforemation I presented. Since I could not find a comparison as listed I had to piece together what I could find. Because of this it MAY BE not entierly correct.

Hope this helps
TF

[joez]

I have a celeron in my laptop, have had it for well over a year now. I play games on it, i watch movies, i surf the web. While it does get hot, i never have any problems with it. Just my $.03

[SAW]

You aren't gonna 'fry' crap by running HL2 or Sims2. I'd wager he could run it fine if he dropped the graphical settings to low.

It will, I loaded HL2 on a friend's P4 notebook.

[MantisMag]

ok here's the breakdown. celeron is your cheap junk. it'll do for basic stuff. P4 chips are great but they suck up power and generate a lot of heat which requires it be bigger heavier and have bigger and heavier fans that eat up yet more power. Centrino in my opinion is the way to go. low power, cooler, and more efficient. it's not as fast as a P4 but not as slow as you would think from the clock speed. contrary to what bornl33t said it is not just a throttled P4. it has many optimizations that make it better. these are optimizations to reduce power without reducing performance by too much. one way to do this is to make the processor do more work with less clock cycles. another way is to dynamically shut off parts of the processor that aren't in use. this has a small effect on performance but a very large effect on heat and power usage. there's lots more but i think you get the idea. Centrino chips are not the same as P4 chips. if you're not looking simply for raw power in many ways they are the better chips.

[tony3]

Thanks guys, so from what I've been seeing centrio is about the same or equal to a pentium M, pentium M works as hard as you need it to work. It will have a longer battery life, not get as hot.

[MantisMag]

centrino IS pentium M
centrino refers to the combination of technologies for mobility and wireless connectivity. the pentium M core is part of that.

[Acer12]

Get an apple. Since your going to be spending around 1000 you should get a 12" apple notebook. super fast youll like it.

[tony3]

Ehhh, no thanks I shall stick to a non-apple computer.

[bornl33t]

centrino IS pentium M
centrino refers to the combination of technologies for mobility and wireless connectivity. the pentium M core is part of that.

no it's not

Pm is not a throttled p4, it's something else entierly. Benchmarks show that the centrino and PM's don't run as fast as the P4.

Do some research on tom's