Prague Tech

What follows is in response to a post at the Expats.cz tech forum asking about the differences between celeron processors and the more expensive offerings from Intel.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this is my impression of how Intel markets things.

Celeron = As cheap as possible. Hot, Slow, Sucks up batteries fast. They accomplish this by reusing old architectures and reducing the amount of on-die cache (on-die cache is the fastest memory in the computer and thus has a huge impact on certain types of performance.)

Pentium M = The old standard bearer for computers needing a good combination of performance and battery life.

Core Solo and Core Duo = The new standard bearer for those wanting a good combination of performance and long battery life. The Core series of processors has been able to get better battery life by reducing the chips power consumption. This was accomplished by a better power management system and also by reducing the size of all the “itty-bitty wires” inside the chip. Smaller wires take less power it would seem. Again correct me if I am wrong.

As the names imply the Core Duo is a dual core chip, and the Core Solo is a single core chip. Dual core chips basically have 2 processors stuffed in to the space that was occupied previously by a single processor. With two processors the idea is that your computer can do more work in less time. Also the Core Duo chip seems to be able to turn off one core to save energy when you are not doing a bunch of heavy number crunching.

There are manufactures who are putting desktop processors in to laptops. These of course tend to be bigger, weight more, get hotter and have shorter battery life. With all those negatives you get better performance that can be used toward computation intensive applications. (Games, video editing, decoding the human genome etc.)

Info about AMD’s mobile processors