I'd still be using my Dell Core 2 notebook if it wasn't such a heat monster and the graphics were just a little less terrible (also hot when you actually make it do some light 3D). Although even if Dell had put excellent cooling in it there is still the issue that you'd need a really huge battery to get more than 2 or 3 hours of active usage out of it due to the power draw. Hmm, typing it out, only 1 out of 3 main notebook traits was acceptable with Core 2. It's amazing actually how it's only in the last 2 or 3 years that notebooks have actually become somewhat acceptable as an actual portable device.
Looking forward to Kabini's and BayTrail's successors, should be great for sub 15 inch travel notebooks. They should have better IPC than Core 2 with a big jump in graphics and at much less power usage.
Sandybridge and Ivybridge still a bit too power hungry for travel notebooks imo, i.e. not your primary or work machine. Haswell is good but pay a bit too much of a premium for my liking for it in sub 15 inch form.
Fair enough, and agreed on the same token.
I used something like this recently while setting up a user for Office 365, and it was absolutely astonishingly terrible :
http://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-Black-P...Opera/21634598
Things that should have taken at most 5-10 seconds took well over a minute. Opening three tabs + syncing a small 3GB outlook OST brought the thing to a nearly frozen state. I wanted to take a sledgehammer to it. And it cost nearly 500 bucks. The beater laptop I use for work (that I'm typing this on) is a lowly T4200 2Ghz C2D (Pentium dual-core branded), with 4GB DDR2, and it's like a lightning bolt by comparison in terms of usability. At present I have outlook 2013, a half dozen PDF tabs (Foxit), another couple dozen web tabs (Firefox and Chrome), and it's still instantly responsive to what I tell it to do.
No, but there is an obscene proliferation of those "netbook chips" on the market. Many of those AIO PCs have them. I wonder if someone took a weighted average of PCs sold, and the CPUs contained within, whether the overall performance average is decreasing over time.
Would that be a sign that Moore's law (the laymen's version) is going backwards?
I'm just glad the community as a whole tends to agree with my sentiments whether they'll say so or not. I see it through the people who are dedicated to pushing that extra performance day after day with the development and testing of techniques like delidding and relidding, custom BIOS to remove GPU boost and raise power targets on the GPU, etc. With overclocking I can still realize most of these gains by intentionally violating the manufacturer specified power targets. It'd be nice to see them engineer a chip with looser thermal tolerances though, because I certainly have no problem with paying for extra/better cooling.
I agree. One thing I often point out to people, is which CPU has the higher power consumption? The one that uses 50W (0.05KWh) for two hours to do a task, or the one that uses 75W (0.075KWh) but only needs one hour for the same task...?
(Disclaimer: the above is grossly simplified and not representative of actual numbers)
The 75W one. Power consumption != energy consumption.
I agree. My last 3 laptops have all been Pentium M Dothans (1.6Ghz, 1.7Ghz, 1.8Ghz) and I still use them for browsing in 2014. Overall, I feel that the experience is better than my 2012 netbooks (Atom N2600, AMD C-50) which are dual-core, and it can work nicely with a light Linux OS also. Many people credit the Core2Duo for Intel "bouncing back" but I think that the Pentium M was a big step in the right direction also (that possibly gets overlooked in the "CPU architecture evolution" by enthusiasts because it is mobile ?).As a side-note I'm really impressed just how well the (Dothan) Pentium M has aged. Perhaps that's partly because of the massive (for the time) 2MB L2.
Any thoughts on this matter...?
Definitely agree, and I hope you're right about the future. Reading customer reviews of AMD A4-1200, A4-1250, E1-1200, E1-2100 etc. laptops, the amount of people complaining about performance and returning these laptops seems very sad and ridiculous, and makes you wonder why they are even selling them at all. Customer reviews for the Celeron N2805 laptops don't seem much better either (not sure if N2806 or N2807 refreshes will help much). Are these companies intentionally trying to ruin their own reputations so that no one will want to buy a new computer? For someone looking for "budget" you're better off getting something old and used for <$100 than the $350-$450 they're trying to milk out of these things, I think.We're on the tail end now hopefully (for the sake of progress). The ultra-low performance processors are a bit weaker than I think deserve to exist outside of tablets. Something in the raw performance range of a 2.2Ghz C2D 2MB CPU should be the absolute floor in 2014, yet there are products from both Intel and AMD in the supply chain that can make a grown man cry from the sheer pathetic performance they yield.
I think 14nm will finally nail that coffin shut, there will no longer be any excuse for something that performs worse than a processor nearly a decade down the line, regardless of power consumption.
This, 100%. I mean, I applaud companies for improving their performance/watt, but NOT if it drops overall raw performance below commonly-accepted levels.Definitely agree, and I hope you're right about the future. Reading customer reviews of AMD A4-1200, A4-1250, E1-1200, E1-2100 etc. laptops, the amount of people complaining about performance and returning these laptops seems very sad and ridiculous, and makes you wonder why they are even selling them at all. Customer reviews for the Celeron N2805 laptops don't seem much better either (not sure if N2806 or N2807 refreshes will help much). Are these companies intentionally trying to ruin their own reputations so that no one will want to buy a new computer? For someone looking for "budget" you're better off getting something old and used for <$100 than the $350-$450 they're trying to milk out of these things, I think.
Customer reviews for the Celeron N2805 laptops don't seem much better either (not sure if N2806 or N2807 refreshes will help much).
Looking back, I probably would have upgraded once or twice in the interim if Fry's still had those free ECS motherboard with CPU deals. But once those dried up, combined with how damn powerful C2D was (especially when overclocked) and how expensive DDR3 vs DDR2 was at the time, it only made sense to upgrade now.