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

[Ranger REG]

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.

Most applications. So how are Pentium M rated for...

Gaming (3D)?
Audio mixing (MP3, CD-burning)?
Film editing (DVD)?
Office applications (word processing)?

And how long is Pentium M laptop's battery life in between recharge, under normal use?

 

[drothgery]

Most applications. So how are Pentium M rated for...

Gaming (3D)?
Audio mixing (MP3, CD-burning)?
Film editing (DVD)?
Office applications (word processing)?

Gaming -- Suprisingly good, mostly because graphics cards have more to do with gaming performance than the CPU.
Audio/video - this is the P-M's weak spot
Office apps - quite good, though most moder CPUs are so fast in typical office app tasks that going from the slowest currently available Celeron to the fastest currently available Athlon 64 FX won't make a noticeable difference.

And how long is Pentium M laptop's battery life in between recharge, under normal use?

That's going to vary quite a bit among individual notebooks, as the CPU isn't the single largest power draw on a notebook (the screen is). If you give a notebook a 17" screen and a desktop-speed hard drive, it's going to have short battery life even if the CPU used no power at all.

 

[Ranger REG]

Okay, what's the average battery life of Pentium M based laptops in the market currenlty?

 

[Alan Shutko]

Okay, what's the average battery life of Pentium M based laptops in the market currenlty?

That depends on the screen size, hard drive speed, battery size and some other things.

I get around 4hrs on my 2.1GHz T42p. Much less if I'm playing games.

 

[Krieg]

Okay, what's the average battery life of Pentium M based laptops in the market currenlty?

Everything else being equal the Pentium M laptop will probably have 33-50% longer battery life.

 

[Raloc]

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).

Pentium M and Celeron M are *not* the same. The P-M is a third generation chip, and combines features of P4 and PIII. Celerons = NO. Big time waste of money there.

As far as Centrino is concerned, it's just a fancy name for having a processor and wireless that meet certain specs. Most of them didn't perform much better than equivalent mobile processors with non-Intel wireless on board.

The Pentium Ms are considerably more efficient and have more memory bandwidth than the regular Pentium 4s. Tests show that a 1.3 P-M is about equivalent to a P4 2.6.

Edit: I see above that others addressed this. The above description of Centrino is correct, mine was more vague for sure

From what I've seen of tests, P4s usually only perform better in terms of integer heavy apps. The P-M has better memory bandwidth anyway.

 

[drothgery]

Pentium M and Celeron M are *not* the same. The P-M is a third generation chip, and combines features of P4 and PIII. Celerons = NO. Big time waste of money there.

There are three different Celerons available right now (well, four, but two are quite similar). There's the Northwood-based Celeron (no suffix), which is an awful chip, because it's got too little cache for the Pentium 4 architecture, but these are dropping out of circulation fairly quickly because Celeron D chips (see below) are cheaper for Intel to make. There's the Prescott-based Celeron D, which is a halfway decent budget chip, because a Pentium 4 with 256K cache isn't all that cache-starved. And then there's the Celeron M, which is, in fact, a Pentium M with half the cache, and plugs into the same motherboard as a Pentium M. Here's Intel's spec sheet: http://www.intel.com/products/notebook/processors/celeron_m/

From what I've seen of tests, P4s usually only perform better in terms of integer heavy apps. The P-M has better memory bandwidth anyway.

Err.. the P4 wins when memory bandwidth or SIMD instructions make a big difference (MMX, SSE, SSE2). The P-M's better at x87 floating point, but anything that really needs floating point should be optimized to use SSE2 instead of x87.

Also, with an 800 MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400 (or DDR2-533) the P4 has far better memory bandwidth than all but the newest Pentium M notebooks. The P-M has a 400 MHz FSB or 533 MHz FSB (only in new designs with the Sonoma chipset). The just-launched-this month Sonoma chipset has dual-channel DDR2-533 support, but the previous, and still much more widely-used Carmel chipset only supports single-channel DDR 333. The Pentium M has more cache than all P4s except for the just-launched P4 6xx series and the hyper-expensive P4 Extreme Edition, and has a very slick cache design, which helps mask the lack of memory bandwidth, but it's not entirely successful.

 

[GlassJaw]

Is AMD worth considering at all for a laptop?

 

[GlassJaw]

AMD - Yes? No? Maybe?

I think I'm going to stay away from a Celeron. Most of my usage will be with it plugged in I think so battery life is not the most crucial factor for me. The main applications I'll be using are Excel, Photoshop, and mp3 listening.

I'll be getting my tax return soon and it might be going towards a new laptop.

 

[mojo1701]

AMD - Yes? No? Maybe?

My laptop that I use at school and whenever I go home has a AMD Athlon XP-M. The battery gives me about 2 1/2 hours, if I turn down the intensity of my monitor. But I'm also running a 15.4" hi-def widescreen monitor, so...

I'll be getting my tax return soon and it might be going towards a new laptop.

Niiiiiiice.