Power book!

[Degenerate]

How does a 15" wide screen, 800mhz G4 laptop run for approx 5 hrs?
An IBM X-series 12", 1.2Ghz P3, run for approx 4 hrs?
what about a IBM A30p, a P4 1.7-8Ghz, with a FireGL vidcard, 15" run for only 2.5hrs?

What has Mac's done to make their notbooks soo much less pwoer hungry?
How does a G4 800Mhz compare to a P3 1.2, or a p4M 2.0?

 

[Utterman]

A G4 processor produces A LOT LESS heat and uses LESS energy than a Pentium processor.

This allows it to have a lot more battery power than those laptops.

 

[Darien]

If you do gaming, a notebook with a PIII 1.2Ghz and a P4 2.0GHz will kick the crap outta the G4 (assuming that each of those notebooks only have 32MB AGP ATI Radeon 7500 and similar specs).

If you do a lot of movie/photo editing, the G4 is pretty competative, and in some cases will be a lot faster than the P3 and P4...

...not often though, unlike what many Mac users will say.

It was a nice processor...2 years ago.

Where the heck is the G5 Motorola/IBM/Apple?!

 

[Degenerate]

So it is almost exclusively due to the CPU?

 

[Darien]

That and probably something about the motherboard design are probably it.

 

[thorin]

The difference in run time (power requirements) is due to the processor architecture.

The future G5 processor using SOI only draws 26W at 1.4GHz while the current G4s (Motorola 7450) draw only 14W at 533MHz.

The 7400 series is also usesCopper in a .15um fab process.

Here's a translated quote from an article on macinfo.de from Feb of last year:

"Intel Low Voltage mobile chips: Chip giant Intel has introduced two new "Ultra Low Voltage" processors for mobile machines, targeting at Transmetas power saving Crusoe chips: The new Pentium III Mobile runs at 500 MHz when the Notebook is plugged to the wall and at 300 MHz on battery power ("SpeedStep Technology"), it consumes 7.9 resp. 4.7 Watts. The Celeron Mobile is new available as a 500 MHz power saving processor (5.0 Watts, no SpeedStep). (Intel)
IBMs PowerPC 750/G3 consumes at 500 MHz (PowerBook G3) typically less than 6 Watts, Motorolas PPC 7400/G4 5 Watts at 400 MHz and the newer PPC 7410 (PowerBook G4) 6 Watts at 500 MHz. The PowerPC is only available as a "regular" processor, there is no need for a power saving version (Intel calles their products "Mobile"). This may change for a mobile G4e processor, at 533 MHz the G4e used in the new desktop Macs consumes typically 14 Watts (there's no information on the 667 and 733 MHz chips). According to some news sites the PowerPC 7410 supports the so called "PowerStep" (analogon to Intels SpeedStep) which lowers the CPU clock rate by 100 MHz if the PowerBook G4 is running on battery power (no official info yet). More interesting numbers: Intels Celeron Mobile consumes 15 Watts at 700 MHz, the Pentium III Mobile 17.6 Watts at 850 MHz. "

Thorin