Extract From Byte Magazine - Aug 06 - Centrino for Notebooks

[Steve Bildermann]

As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

I know, I know. I promised a column on cooling. Well, the stars didn't line up in time for this month, and I had this super laptop sitting on the lab bench (which mysteriously looks a lot like my dining room table) for weeks, so it was time to take a peek at Intel's big mobile push.

Intel has been making laptop chips since the 1980s, but those chips have always been a desktop product that was whittled down a little to operate in a notebook. In recent years, Intel has moved to concurrent development of notebook chips with desktop chips. For example, all P4 chips coming off the line with SpeedStep built in, but only chips planned for notebooks have it enabled.

Notebook performance speeds have lagged behind desktops for one reason: heat. The heatsink and fan on my 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 is taller than a lot of notebooks, and this beast is still an oven. Intel created the Centrino chip from scratch to be a mobile chip, rather than taking a desktop chip and reducing the voltage and frequency.

The Centrino chip is as much a Pentium III as a Pentium IV because Centrino uses a shorter pipeline. The P4 has a longer processing pipeline, which is used to predict the path taken in a piece of code being executed. In other words, it makes an educated guess at the result, such as the outcome of a statement.

If the P4 guesses wrong, it has to execute that code all over again, which means more cycles being used up. For a desktop computer, no big deal, it's plugged into the wall. For the notebook, that means power consumption.

This made the P4 seriously unusable as a notebook computer. The P3, though, ran out of gas at 1.2 GHz. So Intel's designers made a compromise, extending the P3 core and creating a CPU that's somewhere between P3 and P4.

Intel has made things pretty confusing with all its mobile products. There's the Mobile Pentium 4 processor, the Mobile Pentium 4 ProcessorM, Mobile Pentium III Processor M, Pentium M Processor and Mobile Celeron Processor. Intel will phase out the P4 M, which is the older version of the product, while the Mobile Pentium 4 will remain for laptops designed as desktop replacements. These are thicker, heavier laptops that spend a lot of time plugged into a power source.

Centrino notebooks are designed to be thin, light and for low power consumption, and as a result, they have a slower clock speed. It has a 400 MHz bus, up to 2 GB of 266/200 DDR memory, USB 2.0 support, and Intel's PRO/Wireless 2100 802.11b wireless network and Intelligent Scanning Technology that reduces power consumption while scanning for access points.

Centrinos range in speed from 1.6 GHz to 1.8 GHz, whereas the Pentium 4 M is up to 2.6 GHz. But don't be fooled by the clock speed. Even though it clocks slower, the Centrino is actually a speedy notebook with very good performance. The wider bus and fast memory make up for turning down the clock speed.

The laptop being examined is Dell's Latitude D600. It had previously been powered by the Pentium M processor and now has a 1.6 GHz Centrino. This new silver D600 is thinner and more aesthetic than the old C600, measuring 12.4 by 10.1 by 1.5 inches and weighing just 5.3 pounds. It comes with one internal drive bay for a floppy, CD/DVD, a second 40 GB hard drive or second battery.

The test system came loaded with Windows XP Professional Edition, had 512 MB of memory, a 40 GB drive, and ATI's Radeon 9000 mobile chip with 32 MB of memory. Dell also offers two wireless networking choices: Intel Pro wireless 802.11b mini PCI card or Dell's own wireless LAN cards, the TrueMobile 1300 802.11b/g and TrueMobile 1400 802.11a/b/g mini PCI cards.

The first test was battery life, since that's the main selling point. I tried running VeriTest's BatteryMark 2002, but it wouldn't run successfully. It would run through a test, then ask to be powered to full again for another run. After seven hours, it was still on the first of three runs.

So I moved on to a simpler test of just unplugging the laptop and turning off the power saver options. The laptop ran out of juice after four and a half hours. My old Latitude Cpt C, a Celeron 400 system, would be lucky if it got to two hours, and that was with no use. With the second battery, the Latitude D600 made it to over eight hours. With a DVD playing in full screen, the Centrino lasted two hours, while my clunky old Celeron laptop lasted around 80 minutes.

Microsoft worked with Intel on the development of special power modes for Centrino, so even though XP has been on the market for some time, it's ready for Centrino. There are six different power management modes, as opposed to the usual three or four in a regular laptop running anything older than XP. The settings include maximum battery life, max performance and presentations.

In the area of performance, well, forget it, I won't even try to compare it to the Celeron based Latitude: that would not be a fair fight. There is, however, another issue. Centrino's clock speed is much lower than the Pentium 4 M, which clocks up to 2.60 GHz. For so long, customers have been sold on clock speed as a performance of measure, so now Intel has to convince customers that buying a 1.6 to 1.8 GHz chip is not a step down in performance.

The results are somewhat inconclusive, and possibly a reflection of the new CPU throwing off the benchmarks. The SiSoft Sandra CPU benchmark came in at 4,687, which was better than a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 and a 1.7 GHz Celeron, but much slower than the 5,384 for a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4.

However, Veritest's Business Winstone 2002 came back with a score of 25.4, which blows away a good number of laptops with Pentium 4 M processors in the 2.0 GHz and above range. Dell's Inspiron 8500, a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 M powered machine, scores a 23.2 by comparison.

The memory performance is quite good. The Centrino notebook came in at 2,006 MB/second of throughput, which blew away the 957 MB/sec for PC133 memory and better than the 1,596 MB/sec for 266 Mhz DDR memory. Unfortunately, SANDRA has no comparable benchmarks for notebook hard drives, so I didn't run that test.

The wireless functions work great. I tested it at a local Starbucks that offers wireless Internet access. From my car, a good 40 feet from the door, I was able to get a strong signal, which got better as I approached the store. Out of the box, Dell includes wireless software, so there's none of the hassle of setting up those drivers. It automatically detects what kind of wireless network is present just by getting within range.

The bottom line is this isn't a high performance system, and isn't designed to be. It's designed for maximum life, which meant cutting a few corners, such as using a slightly slower CPU and smaller hard disk. This results in less power consumption and a generally cooler notebook. Some of the thicker, faster notebooks are computational hotplates. You won't be melting your lap by sitting a Centrino notebook on it, because it's much cooler.

As for performance, well, you won't be working in Photoshop on a cross country flight, now, will you? But Excel and Word, the two most commonly used applications, use a fraction of the CPU power, and with a single battery, you are pretty much guaranteed operation for a coast to coast flight, which was Intel's unofficial aim of the Centrino.

It's not a revolution, but it's a nice, big evolution in mobile technology.

Centrino notebooks are available now from all of the usual laptop vendors; Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, Gateway and Toshiba, for between $1,600 and $2,200 dollars, depending on the features and extras you buy.

On Another Note

First off, I thought I'd weigh in, as one of the 6.5 million people so far who has purchased Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix I was getting a little bored at the end of book four, feeling like J.K. Rowling wasn't really making the characters mature. Well, she changed that in a hurry. There's some very good character development here, which makes the book much more interesting. Harry is going through his teen years in the roughest way possible. I particularly like what she did with Ron and Ginny Weasley.

Rowling's weakness is her inability to do much with the bad guys. Draco remains a one dimensional brat, Snape more unprofessional than ever, and some of the adults in this book behave in the most abysmal manner, particularly for a society that fancies itself superior to "muggles." It was nice to see Harry deliver a major beat down on Malfoy, though. That was long in coming.

Secondly, if you haven't seen a gem of a film called Equilibrium, you must, particularly if you are one of the many disappointed by The Matrix Reloaded In a post nuclear society, the leaders have decided that in order to prevent future wars and violence, they must eliminate the source, and that's man's emotions. So people take an emotion dampening drug.

Christian Bale plays a "cleric," whose job it is to enforce the law against sense crimes (as opposed to thought crimes emotions are the crime here). One day his misses his dose, comes to his senses, and decides to overthrow the dictatorship he's helped to prop up. It's one part 1984, one part The Matrix and one part The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick. The film was released last December and was drowned out by the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, but it's out on video and a real treat.

[Caustic Saint]

Secondly, if you haven't seen a gem of a film called Equilibrium, you must, particularly if you are one of the many disappointed by The Matrix Reloaded In a post nuclear society, the leaders have decided that in order to prevent future wars and violence, they must eliminate the source, and that's man's emotions. So people take an emotion dampening drug.

Christian Bale plays a "cleric," whose job it is to enforce the law against sense crimes (as opposed to thought crimes emotions are the crime here). One day his misses his dose, comes to his senses, and decides to overthrow the dictatorship he's helped to prop up. It's one part 1984, one part The Matrix and one part The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick. The film was released last December and was drowned out by the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, but it's out on video and a real treat.

I've raved about this movie before. The story's not too complex, but the action sequences are simply amazing. The final fight scene is some of the most original choreography I've seen in years.

This film is not to be missed.

[katakori]

for those of you who can read french, a counter-argument from the blog i use to decide if i want to go see a movie or not... cacochyme

Equilibrium (1.5/5)

Quand on voit l'affiche d'Equilibrium, on a tendance a croire que le film va etre une espece de resucee de Matrix. En fait, esthetiquement parlant, le film ressemble plutot a Bienvenue a Gattaca, en un peu plus cheap, avec des images froides legerement bleutees et des decors depouilles. Personnellement, j'aime bien.

Par contre, le postulat de depart est un peu difficile a avaler : apres la troisieme guerre mondiale (evoquee a coups d'images de Saddam Hussein), l'humanite se dit que non, decidement, la guerre c'est pas bien. Et qu'est-ce qui provoque la guerre ? Les sentiments. OK, alors on va inventer un medicament qui supprime les sentiments. C'est un peu enorme, mais comme je suis sympa, je me dis que c'est de la S-F et qu'ils ont du trouver un truc qui remplace la testosterone pour qu'on puisse se reproduire sans se taper dessus, et toutes sortes de choses du meme genre. Allez, je suis tolerant, j'accepte. Par contre, tout au long du film, on voit des mecs rire, se mettre en colere, etc. Ca casse un peu tout.

Bref, c'est dans ce monde foid et deshumanise que se deroule l'histoire, celle d'un mec faisant partie d'un corps d'elite, les Clerics,charge de debusquer les fripons qui prennent pas leurs pilules anti-sentiments et de leur latter la gueule (en gros). Et, o surprise, le mec en question decouvre peu a peu les bienfaits des sentiments et va commencer a se rebeller, un peu comme Lorenzo Lamas, mais en moins neglige quand meme, on rigole pas avec l'hygiene, chez les Clerics. Le truc un peu chiant avec ce personnage, c'est qu'il n'est pas cense etre un super-heros, juste un mec d'un corps d'elite super entraine, et qu'il eclate pourtant tranquillement, sans une goutte de sueur, des dizaines et des dizaines de mecs armes de fusils d'assaut, alignes bien sagement. Alors moi je veux bien qu'on stylise, qu'on parabolise et meme qu'on allegorise, mais trop c'est trop. La, les failles ne sont plus de l'ordre du realisme (ce qui ne serait pas tres grave, puisque c'est quand meme de la SF), mais de la coherence. Et comme l'intrigue en elle-meme est un peu menee au bazooka (oh mon Dieu, j'ai pas pris ma pilule, je suis ultra sensible, noooooooooon, ne tuez pas ce chiooooot !), ca n'arrange rien.

Au milieu de tout ca, on retiendra malgre tout quelques plans sympas, un combat de gun fu bien classe et une ambiance paranoiaque pas si mal rendue. Mais c'est tout.

[cliffy]

It would probly help if I could read French.

Or spell in English :P

[CAkOS]

it says this movie has no story, nothing original, shitty characters, shitty story (again), just a few cool combat scenes.

[katakori]

it's a little bit more elaborate than just "shitty", though...

[Buraku]

Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... disk-space