pentium-m centrino would classify as what architecture?

[whisker]

386, 486...?

thanks

[andrewdodd13]

If it's centrino then its probably P4-M which is i686

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah it's i686, centrino is a way of describing the chipset/wifi combination. Since when did intel actually invent new chips!! Just kidding, I believe it's an underclocked P4 mobile chip.

[borromini]

Centrino is the combo of the Pentium M (not a Pentium 4 mobile!) and the wireless networking... It's a 'platform', Intel is gonna organize all its products around platforms, since the centrino concept met with huge success.

Actually, the P-M is a pretty powerful cpu, it can compare to AMD's Athlon 64 line in some respects (like instructions per clock), but it's not good enough to be a real DTR (it is after all a mobile cpu). At some points, it really lacks performance (don't ask me which ones - i read some reviews stating that, but didn't memorize the weak points...).

[zachtib]

Yeah, I was happier with my Pentium M 1.7Ghz than my Pentium 4 3.2Ghz... funny...

[bigtomrodney]

Is it really that different? I mean a celeron is a pentium with less cache. And the P4m is excellent itself, my laptop chews and it's a 2.4GHz Mobile. It outperforms some faster P4s I've seen, and has a huge range of clockspeeds it will operate at.

[winter]

it realy an hybrid of a P3 and a P4. But the strange thing is if you ran say a p3 class chip at the same clockspeed as a p4. In alot of aplications the p3 would perform better

[borromini]

Is it really that different? I mean a celeron is a pentium with less cache. And the P4m is excellent itself, my laptop chews and it's a 2.4GHz Mobile. It outperforms some faster P4s I've seen, and has a huge range of clockspeeds it will operate at.

Your Pentium 4-M is still a P4... it only consumes a little less power than a desktop chip.

@ Winter: It's not a hybrid. It's based on PIII yes, and at the start, the PIII was faster than P4 at similar clock speeds. I think, if you would put a PIII on 3Ghz though, it would not outperform the P4 with 1MB L2 cache and a 800 Mhz FSB though...

Plus, the PIII wouldn't be able to reach 3 Ghz, even with a smaller production process and stuff; the P4's pipeline is quite a bit longer, so it scales better. That was the primary goal of Intel when it was al about the Ghz.

[bigtomrodney]

Your Pentium 4-M is still a P4... it only consumes a little less power than a desktop chip.

Absolutely I'd agree, but I think the key part of a P4m is that it can underclock itself and with speedstep it will. It often runs at 1.2GHz when I'm just webbrowsing. But for the real power savings I can see why they released Pentium M, slower clock speeds just make more sense in a laptop.

I recently had a 5 day uptime on my laptop. At times it got quite warm I can tell you, but at least half of that was the HDD churning over. I've always wondered why the sides of laptops are not wide open with heatsinks, or have decent cooling from one side to the other.

[borromini]

The desktop P4 has a similar feature called 'thermal throttling', which is activated when the cpu gets too hot; don't know how it works though... I believe the cpu is switched on and of in a matter of milliseconds or something like that, to help it cool down.

The P4-M indeed has those features, I forgot about that . But it is the same core afaik.