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| Buying a Laptop Computer |
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Different
Processors
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More detailed history
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Way back in the 90s, it was easy to say that such and such chip was faster than
another one, simply by looking at the clock-speed, or the number of GHz. A
Pentium 1.5GHz was faster than an AMD 1.0GHz. But as the speed of processors
increased, the structure of the processor itself became a more important
determining factor. It's like cars. What's faster: A Porsche Carrera with a 3.2L
engine or a Honda Accord with a 3.5L engine? Another example of "it's not the
size that matters". |
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That's why AMD decided to change their chip-naming to numbers that reflected
performance rather than speed. Therefore, an AMD Athlon 2200 does not
mean it runs at 2.2GHz. In 2004, Intel followed suit by
renaming
their chips using a 3-digit number (e.g. 725) which describes the internal
components of the processor itself.
Why should we care? Because let's say one dealer advertises a laptop as
containing an Athlon 2200 chip, and another is offering a laptop with Intel
Celeron 1.8GHz, and yet another says the laptop is powered by Pentium 725. Can
you tell which is faster just from the name? Probably not.
Now that we've cleared up that numbers in ads can be deceiving, should we
listen to advertisers that say Pentiums are better than Celerons? Well, in the
early days of the Celeron chip, its performance was appreciably worse than that
of a comparable Pentium chip. But when AMD entered the low-end market with the
Duron, Intel was forced to power-up its Celeron chips and now even the low-end
chips have significant power. That's the beauty of competition. The consumer
wins. For most of us, Celerons and Durons are more than enough to handle the
most commonly used programs. Since they are usually $100 to $150 cheaper than
their bigger brothers, use that money to get more RAM and you're MUCH
better off. We'll talk about RAM later. |
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Now the next step in evolution is that towards mobile computing.
Early laptops had the same chips used for desktops, but these chips were hot and
needed big fans to cool them. Having big fans in a desktop was easy, but early
laptops had to be bulky to accommodate the fan and allow for good airflow to
cool the chip. |
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Desktop |
Mobile |
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Athlon
Duron |
Athlon-M
Duron-M |
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Pentium
Celeron |
Pentium-M
Celeron-M |
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Desktop chips also need lots of power. In a plugged-in desktop, no problem. But
laptops with "regular" chips in them couldn't hold a charge for more than an
hour or two. Battery design has improved, but the chips were still requiring a
lot of power. Enter the low-voltage "M" chips for Mobile.
Laptops with M chips can be made smaller, are quieter (no fan), and batteries
can last up to 4 hours or more. However, M chips do sacrifice some power,
although probably not enough to affect average users. They are also more
expensive than comparable desktop chips. But an important distinction must be
made - when comparing chips having the same speed (or GHz number), the M-chip is
more powerful than a desktop chip. That is why a laptop with a Pentium-M 1.6GHz
is about as powerful as a desktop with a Pentium-4 2.6GHz processor After that very brief
synopsis, we can see that Celeron and Duron chips are not as bad as many people
think, and that M chips are more powerful at lower speeds. Let's talk next about
random access memory, or RAM. |
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