Laptop CPU's - AMD Athlon, Celeron, Pentium M, or P4?

[GlassJaw]

I'm seriously considering getting a laptop and while I know what features I want, I'm a little unsure of the CPU. I'm quite familiar with desktop CPU's but not as much with laptops.

I have an AMD Athlon CPU in my self-built home PC and I've been very happy with it. Historically, the Celeron has been the red-headed stepchild of Intel's CPU's. I don't know much about the Pentium M.

So for laptops, what are the differences? Does one have better reliability/cooling than the others? What about power and battery usage?

 

[reveal]

I'm seriously considering getting a laptop and while I know what features I want, I'm a little unsure of the CPU. I'm quite familiar with desktop CPU's but not as much with laptops.

I have an AMD Athlon CPU in my self-built home PC and I've been very happy with it. Historically, the Celeron has been the red-headed stepchild of Intel's CPU's. I don't know much about the Pentium M.

So for laptops, what are the differences? Does one have better reliability/cooling than the others? What about power and battery usage?

If you get an Intel chip, make sure you get a Centrino. My laptop gets an average of 4 hours of battery life, almost twice as much as a non-Centrino chip. I'm not sure about any other chips.

 

[drothgery]

If you care about battery life, get a Pentium M or a Celeron M (both of these usually have "Centrino" branding). If you care about battery life and performance, get a Pentium M. Don't get a Pentium 4 or "regular" Celeron (Celeron with no letter after it, or Celeron D) laptop unless you're almost always going to use it plugged in, and it's cheap.

AMD's pretty much a non-factor in laptops; you can find some Athlon XP, Sempron, and Athlon 64 notebooks, but you really have to look for them. They're better than the P4 variants (Pentium 4 or normal Celeron) for notebooks, but not as good as the P-M variants (Pentium M or Celeron M).

 

[reveal]

When I bought my laptop, I had the choice of a regular Pentium 4, 3.4Ghz, for about $200 less than the one I bought which has a Penitum Centrino 1.6Ghz. Like I said before, the battery life is incredible with this thing. I've used laptops at work that got me maybe 2 hours not plugged in, if I was lucky. I took my new laptop with me on a business trip and used it on the plane from the time they told me I could turn it on until they told me to turn it off. It was about 2 hours and my battery was at ~50%.

 

[drothgery]

Reveal, you've got a Pentium M.

"Centrino" is a brand Intel came up with for notebooks with all of the following:

• A Pentium M or Celeron M CPU*
• A motherboard using the 855M or 915M chipset
• One of several Intel wireless cards

* I'm not 100% certain OEM's can use the 'Centrino' branding with Celeron M's, but they're just Pentium M's with half the cache, and they use the same components for the rest of the system.

 

[John Crichton]

Just bought a new laptop in November so I'm fresh off of massive research. I completely agree with the Pentium M/Centrino. Getting one without it would be foolish considering that a laptop is supposed to be portable. I'd stay away from the M-Celerons myself even though they are cheaper. The P4/M/Centrino is certainly the way to go.

As for brands/makes/models I found www.notebookreview.com to be very helpful for multiple reviews and daily deal watching.

 

[Alan Shutko]

The P4/M/Centrino is certainly the way to go.

Just to clarify, you want a Pentium M, NOT a P4M! The Pentium M is actually newer and much, much faster than the P4M. Pentium-Ms are the best performance per clock cycle that you can get from Intel today.

 

[John Crichton]

Just to clarify, you want a Pentium M, NOT a P4M! The Pentium M is actually newer and much, much faster than the P4M. Pentium-Ms are the best performance per clock cycle that you can get from Intel today.

Hmmm, didn't know there was such a thing as a P4M. Oh well.

 

[Ranger REG]

Just to clarify, you want a Pentium M, NOT a P4M! The Pentium M is actually newer and much, much faster than the P4M. Pentium-Ms are the best performance per clock cycle that you can get from Intel today.

Are they less powerful than regular P4? I mean, will I get the same performance from a 1.7-GHz PM compared to a desktop 1.7-GHz P4 (hypothetically speaking, I don't know for sure if there is such a desktop CPU processer)?

 

[drothgery]

Are they less powerful than regular P4? I mean, will I get the same performance from a 1.7-GHz PM compared to a desktop 1.7-GHz P4 (hypothetically speaking, I don't know for sure if there is such a desktop CPU processer)?

Clock for clock, Pentium Ms are usually much faster than Pentium 4s, except in the handful of applications that the Pentium 4 is really good at (mostly video encoding and related stuff) or in applications constrained by memory bandwidth (and this is much less of a problem with the newest Pentium M notebooks, which use the 915M chipset, have a 533 MHz FSB, and have dual-channel memory). A 2 GHz Pentium M is roughly comprable with a 3 GHz Pentium 4 in most applications. But you can get a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4, and the Pentium M tops out at 2.13 GHz for now.