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Adam Warner wrote:
> The Pentium-M is a decent laptop processor. When it is included alongside
> an Intel-authorised wireless solution and chipset the combination is
> called Centrino.

What chipsets are worthy of the centrino label?


--
M.C.S.E :- Minesweeper Consultant & Solitaire Expert

Hi Bruce Flyger,

> What chipsets are worthy of the centrino label?

<http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/mobile/855_fam.htm>

Regards,
Adam

Richard Malcolm-Smith <> wrote in
news:bldta1$551$:

> All the centrino packages I have seen include obsolite wireless in
> there plethora of features.
>
> I am looking for a new laptop so if anyone knows of a pentium M laptop
> that either has an empty mini-pci slot that can add a card of my
> choice to, or comes with an 802.11a/b/g card I would be interested.
>

Just putting this here for those that are interested in knowing the
difference between the a/b/g

http://802.11abg.rtx.dk/

The 802.11b standard was approved 4 years ago.

On Wed, 01 Oct 2003 15:07:23 +1200, Adam Warner wrote:

> Hi ~misfit~,
>
>> Centrino is the shiznit. If I were in the market for a laptop I wouldn't
>> look at anything else. Not fussed about the wireless networking bit but
>> the CPU knocks the socks off P4s clocked at over twice the speed. *And*
>> does it using less power and producing less heat.
>
> By not looking at anything else (even though you are not fussed about the
> wireless card) you are destined to purchase a marchitecture!

Thanks Adam, you saved me mentioning that.

If you don't care about good wireless, a 'centrino' machine can be a good
choice.

If you do care about wireless, try to look for a Pentium M without an
Intel 802.11 adapter.

I'm thinking about getting a laptop soon, and it'll probably be either a
Pentium M Thinkpad or an Apple iBook.

Cheers
Anton

On Wed, 01 Oct 2003 18:49:46 +1200, Richard Malcolm-Smith wrote:

> rob wrote:
>
>> I have been looking at specs for Notebooks but am finding it hard to
>> make a comparison because I know nothing about the new Centrino chips.
>> Does anyone know if they are worth considering and how centrino
>> performance compares to P4, P4M etc?
>> tia for any info, links etc.
>
> All the centrino packages I have seen include obsolite wireless in there
> plethora of features.
>
> I am looking for a new laptop so if anyone knows of a pentium M laptop
> that either has an empty mini-pci slot that can add a card of my choice
> to, or comes with an 802.11a/b/g card I would be interested.

Some of the Pentium M Thinkpad R40s come with either IBM or Cisco
wireless chipsets.

I think the IBM and Cisco ones are a/b while Centrino is just b (?). Not
sure about any g support yet. Corrections welcome

Cheers
Anton

Hi Anton,

>> By not looking at anything else (even though you are not fussed about
>> the wireless card) you are destined to purchase a marchitecture!
>
> Thanks Adam, you saved me mentioning that.

Marchitecture is a wonderful description of a technologist's nightmare.
Can't be long until it's an officially recognised word.

> If you don't care about good wireless, a 'centrino' machine can be a
> good choice.
>
> If you do care about wireless, try to look for a Pentium M without an
> Intel 802.11 adapter.

(Yes, it's perverse)

> I'm thinking about getting a laptop soon, and it'll probably be either a
> Pentium M Thinkpad or an Apple iBook.

I'm looking forward to x86-64/AMD64 laptops becoming mainstream. And they
probably won't command a price premium above high-end Intel 32-bit
laptops. I can use my laptop as a development environment and it's fully
in sync with my desktop and servers. In the future I intend to work on an
AMD64 implementation of Common Lisp so I'll eventually want a laptop with
the same capabilities.

I'd suggest getting a laptop with the same architecture as your
work/development environment, whatever that is. Unless you intend to use
the laptop to assist in testing of cross-architecture support, any other
choice may lead to unexpected bugs, incompatibilities or limitations.

Regards,
Adam

On Thu, 02 Oct 2003 12:53:40 +1200, Adam Warner wrote:

> Marchitecture is a wonderful description of a technologist's nightmare.
> Can't be long until it's an officially recognised word.

Yep it's an even better work than benchmarketing.

> I'm looking forward to x86-64/AMD64 laptops becoming mainstream. And
> they probably won't command a price premium above high-end Intel 32-bit
> laptops. I can use my laptop as a development environment and it's fully
> in sync with my desktop and servers. In the future I intend to work on
> an AMD64 implementation of Common Lisp so I'll eventually want a laptop
> with the same capabilities.
>
> I'd suggest getting a laptop with the same architecture as your
> work/development environment, whatever that is. Unless you intend to use
> the laptop to assist in testing of cross-architecture support, any other
> choice may lead to unexpected bugs, incompatibilities or limitations.

That's a good point, but I think I'll be safe as my only infrequent
attempts at impersonating a developer tend to be in either Python, PHP or
more rarely Perl

Heading more OT now towards AMD64: We have a J2EE product that can be
hosted by ASPs (using JBoss), and the Opteron is sounding very interesting
to me for hosting purposes. Although JVMs are only 32bit at the moment,
AMD64 (on a 64bit OS) allows 32bit processes to have their own full 32bit
address space all to themselves (if I understand correctly).

As each customer would be running on their own JVM process and RAM seems
to be the scaling limit at this stage, we could stuff lots of memory in
something like IBM eSeries 325s (still not available in NZ yet I think)
and get more customers on what are still very cost effective machines.
Sounds much nicer than segmented memory hacks on Xeons.

It would likely to be much better value than Sparc/Solaris, and with a
64bit Windows Server option for any unix phobic hosting companies. Of
course they could still run it on Solaris or AMD64/Linux if they wanted.

I'd love an Opteron server to play with
I hope the corporate IT world starts buying them up and isn't scared off
by Intel propaganda.

Cheers
Anton

"AD." <> wrote in message
news...
> If you don't care about good wireless, a 'centrino' machine can be a good
> choice.
>
> If you do care about wireless, try to look for a Pentium M without an
> Intel 802.11 adapter.

Whats wrong with the "Intel" adapter's in a Pentium M?
Must be something that I'm missing...

"Richard Malcolm-Smith" <> wrote in message
news:bldta1$551$...
> All the centrino packages I have seen include obsolite wireless in there
> plethora of features.
>
> I am looking for a new laptop so if anyone knows of a pentium M laptop
that
> either has an empty mini-pci slot that can add a card of my choice to, or
comes
> with an 802.11a/b/g card I would be interested.

Tosh, HP, Acer, Fujitsu have all got new laptops/Tablets on the verge of
coming out that are M's - around 1.5Ghz some of them with the option of G.
Samples doing the rounds now, out next month. Drooling...

On Thu, 02 Oct 2003 18:24:49 +1200, Nathan Mercer wrote:

> "AD." <> wrote in message
> news...
>> If you don't care about good wireless, a 'centrino' machine can be a
>> good choice.
>>
>> If you do care about wireless, try to look for a Pentium M without an
>> Intel 802.11 adapter.
>
> Whats wrong with the "Intel" adapter's in a Pentium M? Must be something
> that I'm missing...

It's spelled out in the thread Adam linked to, but basically Centrino only
does slow old 802.11b, and has just delayed/given up on it's a/b version
of Centrino - no sign of g Centrino coming up yet either (I could be wrong
about that bit though).

Which is why plain old Pentium M is preferred for wireless users. If you
don't care about wireless much, then Centrino doesn't matter and you get
more choice in laptop models. A majority of Pentium M laptops seem to use
the Centrino 'marchitecture'.

Cheers
Anton