Difference in Processors

[foolishone]

I read this in another post:

Look for
Pentium M chip/Centrino(a package of wireless and the pentium M chip and, umm... something else :confused-This will increase your uptime while away from a charger while still allowing you a strong processor. 1.3GHz Pentium M is not equivilent to a 1.3GHz Pentium 4... Not sure about the conversion but the pentium M is stronger at lower MHz then an equally labeled Pentium 4..

I get the statement, what it is saying, but how does that work? This is the first time I have heard that. What is the conversion?

[kram 2.0]

When you measure a processor's performance, it used to be that you could look at the clock speed rating, in Ghz and that would give a semi-accurate reading of its performance. Since then, things have changed. Intel has used quad pumping effectively to have an effective 800Mhz FSB while the bus speed in the Athlon 64 was integrated into the chip of the processor as 400Mhz. Cache on both the Northwood and the Athlon 64 were raised to 512k and 1MB (Prescott Core). So to take this into account, there was no way to just look at the clock speed and rate its performance. The Intel Pentium-M processor raises the Level 2 cache to 2MB and uses a shorter set of pipeline instructions from which to process. That way, it is a super-efficient processor that is capable of competing with a processor twice its clock speed. It also uses very little power to do its job. Hope that cleared it up slightly.

kram

[foolishone]

That post enlightened me. In one post you answered all my questions and explained the answers to the question. Thanks kram

^fo

[kram 2.0]

Originally Posted by foolishone That post enlightened me. In one post you answered all my questions and explained the answers to the question. Thanks kram ^fo

Sure thing.

kram