Trying to decide on a new notebook for work and was wondering if anyone has
a good comparisonsite for Intel CPUS, specifically PIII 1.2Ghz vs. Pentium M
1.5 - 1.8Ghz range vs. P4 mobile around the 3Ghz range. No one compares
them to older CPUs like the PIII that I currently have.
Different P4s have been used in notebooks: desktop P4s, Mobile P4s and
P4-Ms... with varying degress of power management, from near none in the
1st down to tolerable in the last. The 1st would only be applicable to a
system used as a replacement desktop type notebook with no regard to
battery life. AFAIK none of those P4s get close to a P-M on battery life
so the answer for you is it depends somewhat on your targeted usage. It
would also appear that P4-based notebooks are disappearing from product
lines.
Just trying to figure out if it's worth it. Of course the whole system
matters, but I am just wondering from a pure CPU performance what the
difference in speed is. Thanks in advance!
With the original Pentium-Ms a 1.5GHz was usually considered approximately
equal to a P4 2.4GHz; with the increase in P-M L2 cache and memory speed
since then and the P4 not changing much if at all, it could be closer to a
P-M 1.5GHZ == P4 2.6GHz but I don't have accurate data on that.
Whether it's worth it to upgrade from a PIII 1.2GHz, or whether to wait for
a further speed bump, depends on what you do with it and what your goals
are: how much is startup time bothering you and how and how does general
performance look compared to recent desktops? Recent upgrades we've made
from PIII 800MHz to P-M 1.5GHz have made a huge difference so you're going
to see a significant improvement. The performance/price sweet spot just
now seems to be a 1.7GHz P-M; when looking at prices be careful about
warranty terms (1year vs. 3 year) and note that there are still P-Ms in the
channel with the older CPU with 1MB of L2 cache.