What is the BEST laptop CPU?

Jan 25, 2006
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First of all is the new "Core Duo" 64 bit? I imagine it's dual core...

Whats the advantage of having one of those Laptop CPUs versus a regular Athlon 64 or P4?

I want to buy a new laptop, I will probably be using it mostly for internet, movies, and maybe games. I usually do many thngs at a time so im guessing dual core is the way to go...


any suggestions?
 

stevty2889

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Dec 13, 2003
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Core Duo isn't 64 bit, but yes it's dual core. Pentium-M's laptops tend to get better battery life(that includes core duo, which is a dual core pentium-m). The advantages over a regular A64 is lower power consumption, the advantage over a P4 is much better battery life, much lower heat generated.

As for you doing many things at a time, it depends on how CPU intensive they are as to how much you will benifit from a dual core. If you are doing mostly just internet and movies, any current CPU will be plenty. Games are more dependant on the video card, and amount of ram.
 

secretanchitman

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Apr 11, 2001
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next gen core duo is supposed to get 64bit i think. but now, i think core duo is great, then its a tie between dothan/turion64, then banias.
 

Cooler

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Mar 31, 2005
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Originally posted by: secretanchitman
next gen core duo is supposed to get 64bit i think. but now, i think core duo is great, then its a tie between dothan/turion64, then banias.
and at the very bottem is intel's moble p4 (I have one they are so hot!)

 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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Is money a concern ? The Turion 64 is the best bang/buck, almost as good battery life as the Pentium M, same performance, but much cheaper. Core duo I am sure is exspensive and can't have as good a battery life. So how much of a concern is battery life and money ?
 

Furen

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Oct 21, 2004
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Battery life for Core Duo seems pretty good since it is a 65nm chip, so I wouldn't say thats a problem. Price is, however, as is availability (or it was last time I checked). No 64 bits on it also makes me kind of hesitate to upgrade my laptop quite yet (I'm gonna wait for AMD's dual-core Turions... and if they suck, there's always Merom).
 

Avalon

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Jul 16, 2001
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The entire Centrino platform in and of itself tends to get better battery life than a Turion 64 equipped laptop, so take that into consideration. The Core Duos are outstanding laptop chips that run almost as cool as single core Dothans did. If price is no concern, and you think that you stress out your processor now with multiple applications, the Core Duo would be a good choice for you.

If you're not really stressing the processor with multiple apps, I'd suggest a Pentium M laptop on the Centrino platform.
 

Marmion

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Dec 1, 2005
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I thought Core Duo battery life was just as good as the Pentium M, but its the graphics cards (x1600 etc.) which decrease battery life? Don't quote me for it though.
As for 64bit in laptops, well the max capacity of the Core Duo platform is 2GB anyway isn't it? As far as I know, its the max for any laptop platform - I havn't seen any 2GB DDR2 SODIMM modules around lately (ever). And Vista is coming out in 32bit editions, AND, who would honestly upgrade to Vista from XP on current hardware.
AMD isnt going to 65nm for a while - 2007 I believe - so I don't see any dual core turions that will be equal in battery life to Core Duo in a while.
 

Hard Ball

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Jul 3, 2005
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Dothans, and other P6 based cores including the Yonah do pretty well in applications that involve large amount of integer calcuations, and ones that iterate over a limited data set that fits within the L2. They really become very stagnant when faced with FP calculations, and especially data structures that require large memory bandwidth and/or low latency. Yonah actually takes an additional cache latency hit from 10 to 14 cycles, because of the new arbitration bus logic between the cores and the L2.

I have done a number of tests in computational linguistics, including FFT over phoneme banks, LSIM over larger corpora, as well as DAGs involving weighted FST on morphological transformations, and other tests. In all of the FP and memory intensive tests, the Dothan chips came in 20% or more slower than an Mobile A64 chip with single channel memory, at the same clock speed of 2.0GHz.

## edit; clocks were the same
 

TuxDave

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Oct 8, 2002
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Core duo hands down. Unless you're a simple web surfer then you probably can settle for something cheaper but when I'm using my laptop at home I tend multitask on it pretty intensively and if having a dual core cpu makes the computer less laggy, then I'm sold.
 
Jan 25, 2006
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Correct me if I'm wrong but arenlt dual core and 64 bit procs just 4 bragging rights (particularly 64bit)? Virtually none of the current software can take advantage of these features, not the operating system or games. Every once in a while they come out w/ a 64 bit edition but I see no major improvments...

is it worth going 64 bit dual core for a while....when WILL it be worth it?
 

Unkno

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Jun 16, 2005
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Originally posted by: sebastienmaass
Correct me if I'm wrong but arenlt dual core and 64 bit procs just 4 bragging rights (particularly 64bit)? Virtually none of the current software can take advantage of these features, not the operating system or games. Every once in a while they come out w/ a 64 bit edition but I see no major improvments...

is it worth going 64 bit dual core for a while....when WILL it be worth it?


duel core is actually VERY useful and not only for bragging rights. 64 bit procs would be much more useful when vista comes out and everyone moves onto it with 64bit software. There is no difference having 64 bit right now as long as the os is 32bit
 

Zim

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Dec 25, 2003
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Originally posted by: Unkno
Originally posted by: sebastienmaass
duel core is actually VERY useful and not only for bragging rights. 64 bit procs would be much more useful when vista comes out and everyone moves onto it with 64bit software. There is no difference having 64 bit right now as long as the os is 32bit
At the moment, dual core is of limited use, as is 64-bits. However, this situation is likely to change considerably over the next year. If I was buying a new laptop now, I would be sure it was 64-bit. Dual core would be nice but not essential. But that's just me.
 

bjc112

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Dec 23, 2000
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Originally posted by: Zim
Originally posted by: Unkno
Originally posted by: sebastienmaass
duel core is actually VERY useful and not only for bragging rights. 64 bit procs would be much more useful when vista comes out and everyone moves onto it with 64bit software. There is no difference having 64 bit right now as long as the os is 32bit
At the moment, dual core is of limited use, as is 64-bits. However, this situation is likely to change considerably over the next year. If I was buying a new laptop now, I would be sure it was 64-bit. Dual core would be nice but not essential. But that's just me.

Dual core is significantly more useful than 64bit extensions at the moment.. I wouldn't care if AMD even supported 64 bit yet..
 

imported_Mant

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Mar 3, 2005
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Re Core Duo battery life, check out this article over at Tom's Hardware .
I haven't seeen it anywhere else yet, but they said they found a WinXP SP2 driver glitch that reduces battery life by more than an hour in a particular circumstance (plugged in USB2.0 drive). If anyone has seen this anywhere else, please post a link.
I have to assume MS will have this fixed post haste, but the article is interesting, even if Tom does toot his own horn for finding it.:shocked:

EDIT punctuation
 

Zim

Golden Member
Dec 25, 2003
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Originally posted by: bjc112
Originally posted by: Zim
At the moment, dual core is of limited use, as is 64-bits. However, this situation is likely to change considerably over the next year. If I was buying a new laptop now, I would be sure it was 64-bit. Dual core would be nice but not essential. But that's just me.
Dual core is significantly more useful than 64bit extensions at the moment.. I wouldn't care if AMD even supported 64 bit yet..
At the moment. However, when the world turns to 64-bit, a 32-bit dual core CPU isn't going to be much use.
 

dexvx

Diamond Member
Feb 2, 2000
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Running at the same frequency, the Core Duo has approximately the same, if not better battery life than a Pentium-M Dothan.

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2663&p=10

And to quote the conclusion:

It?s tough to argue with the numbers - at worst, Intel?s Centrino Duo platform offers the same battery life as the previous generation Centrino, while outperforming it. But at best, Centrino Duo can not only offer better performance than last year?s notebooks, but also longer battery life. You really can?t get say anything else - you get better performance, longer battery life and all of this at the same price as last year?s notebooks.

One thing that is very important to keep in mind is that with the Centrino Duo we finally have all of the benefits of a multiprocessor system now in a notebook. That means all of the performance benefits in multithreaded applications as well as the definite reduction in system response time while multitasking are now available to notebook users. While we were very convinced of the move to dual core on the desktop, it may even make more of an impact on the mobile side. The impact on response time, especially when multitasking, is tremendous and quite perceivable. Notebooks are still quite disk limited, but the impact of going to dual core is big enough to be very noticeable.