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Centrino


ChewyPoop

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No' date=' never. What socket is it?

 

I'm upgrading my Palomino 2000+ (which I found out last week has been underclocked for a year :mad:) to an AMD64 3500+ today. I can't wait.[/quote']

 

Just out of interest are you going to be using WIN64 OPS (I've heard some positive reviews), I'm looking forward to seeing some software that fully supports 64bit processors...that's available to the public.

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I've downloaded Ubuntu 64 and Mandriva LE 2005 i86-64 so far.

 

WinXP64 is not available from the UK web site yet, so I might d/l the trial version. I can always roll back ;)

 

 

Incidentally my CPU arrived this morning, but they haven't sent my skt939 mobo yet. So I get to stare at the box all weekend :mad:

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I've downloaded Ubuntu 64 and Mandriva LE 2005 i86-64 so far.

 

WinXP64 is not available from the UK web site yet' date=' so I might d/l the trial version. I can always roll back ;)

 

 

Incidentally my CPU arrived this morning, but they haven't sent my skt939 mobo yet. So I get to stare at the box all weekend :mad:[/quote']

 

Boo, the same thing happend when I ordered my studio equipment...rack PC, synthesizers, mixer, outboard sampler...erm where's the monitor.

 

At least if they'd forgotten something else I'd have a monitor to smack my head against.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a new laptop with a centrino logo on it. Im not sure what this is. I think it is just the way the motherboard is configuered, and the parts used to achieve power at low electrical intake.

 

My laptop has a 1.8gh Dothan Pentium M. This processor is awesome. It's performance is equal to a 3.0gh Pentium 4 processor, do to the different architecture and 2mb of cache.

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It's Intel's primary mobile Pentium processor, but it's actually a lot more than that. Centrino represents a total re-think on the Pentium 4 architecture. As you may recall, many of the design choices that Intel made at that time, including very long instruction pipelines, required the use of RAMBUS-manufactured RDRAM, which was expensive and proprietary, as well as changes in the way compilers were designed, in order to take full advantage of the architectural differences. The venture failed -- one of the greatest failures in the history of computing, in fact, although it's certainly not been reported that way. The compiler changes were never widely made or accepted, and the public backlash over RDRAM is now legend.

 

These choices basically account for why AMD continues to beat Intel in terms of the amount of work they can accomplish per cycle. It isn't well-remembered now, but when earlier P4s were mated with RDRAM and ran appropriately optimized code (not a real-world test, obviously), the Athlons could never beat them at the same clock rate -- it was always a tie at best. But Intel just couldn't escape the cost issue, or convince enough software companies to produce more P4-friendly compilers, and in late 2002/early 2003, Intel threw in the towel and returned to SDRAM, which got around the cost issue, and were able to make up some of the speed shortfalls by embracing DDR2 and the 240-pin memory bus. But the architecture of the P4 is such that they're still, to some extent, saddled by the design choices they made earlier.

 

With Centrino (also known as "Pentium M") they went back to the ground floor, so to speak, redesigning the architecture to take full advantage of dual channel SDRAM (DDR2). Centrino's main focus is actually power efficiency, but as with many chip engineering choices, most of the things you do for power efficiency also help you make the chip process data more efficiently. So what's happened is that Centrino has essentially paved the way for the future of Intel's desktop processors.

 

At some point in 2006 you'll see a version of Centrino for the desktop. My guess is that this will actually become Intel's main product line, replacing the P4 completely. They could have done so already, but I believe they're trying to work 64-bit memory addressing and dual-core features into the mix so that the chip can be positioned as a full-market contender rather than a low-end niche product. This would also seem to complete the cycle and allow Intel to begin moving forward on speeds again (Centrino architecture will probably ramp up a lot better, ultimately allowing the company to finally move past 4ghz, which does not appear to be possible to do in a cost-effective manner with the P4 architecture).

 

It's worth noting, by the way, that Centrino is the reason why Apple is moving to Intel.

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