what's the point of disabling Speed Step on celeron M's?

[dpopiz]

it just means you need a bigger (more expensive) battery to get the same amount of run time.

why would notebook manufacturers want to waste money including a bigger battery just so it can get decent run time?

 

[Idontcare]

product differentiation

 

[dpopiz]

right, but the battery issue is a big deal; if you want to make a laptop with a celeron vs a solo, you have to automatically put in a bigger battery for no reason to break even. and then more battery content goes to the landfill...etc....it seems like bigger batteries cost something to everyone down the line of manufacturing, using, and disposing a laptop, except for intel

 

[dpopiz]

and besides doesn't the word "celeron" just mean lower performance to most people?

nobody thinks celeron and thinks, 'oh so it uses more power'

 

[Zap]

That's the whole point of product differentiation. So, Intel has this processor design. Do they just make one type and try to sell it to everyone? How about a Core Solo at 2GHz, no more, no less and one price. No, there are slower ones for less money and faster ones costing more. If you want more performance, pay more, right? Well, what if people want less performance? Well, nobody will say that, but people do want something "cheaper." What's Intel to do? Do they tell people "pay us minimum $200/CPU or we won't sell you one?" Nah, that will just sell more Turion/Sempron notebooks. Do they go "okay, we'll spend another $2-billion to design another CPU that's cheap?" Sure, spend more money to be able to make less money.

How about this for an answer? "The CPU costs us $40 to make, how about crippling it a bit and selling it for $80, and if someone wants the uncrippled version they can buy one for $200? That way if someone doesn't want to pay as much we still make money from them instead of AMD."

Bingo.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: dpopiz
it just means you need a bigger (more expensive) battery to get the same amount of run time.

why would notebook manufacturers want to waste money including a bigger battery just so it can get decent run time?

But they don't. That's the beauty of product differentiation. If you want more battery run time, then you have to pay more. If you want "faster" performance, then you have to pay more. Indeed some of the low end notebooks have FEWER cell batteries along with the CPUs lacking Speedstep for power management.

What you're asking is "why can't the grocery store sell me that prime rib for the same price as ground chuck, I mean it comes from the same cow and all."

Originally posted by: dpopiz
and besides doesn't the word "celeron" just mean lower performance to most people?

Yes it does, thanks to it being crippled in various ways and the power of Intel's marketing division.

------------------

Of course once Vista comes out and people insist on running it with Aero, battery life will tank anyways, even with SpeedStep.

 

[jazzboy]

I think the simple answer is that it would hurt sales of the regular Pentium M/Core/Core 2 if the Celeron M did have Speedstep. After all I don't think the performance of the current Celeron M is a lot worse than the Pentium M and Core Solo.

Or it could be that some CPU's could have defective Speedstep when produced (like faulty cache), so need to have it disabled.

 

[Arkaign]

Bleh, I understand the economic justification for product differentiation, but I think Intel has made a crucial mistake with Celeron M. I think instead of crippling battery life, they should have just cut more cache. Differentiate performance, don't make people feel like idiots for buying the Intel budget product instead of the AMD budget product.

A client down the hall from me has a Toshiba Satellite, with 4-cell Lithium-Ion, and a 1.5Ghz Celeron M w/1MB L2 cache. Performance is adequate, but battery life is HORRIBLE. It is less than 4 months old, and gets under 1 hr on a full charge. That's not playing DVDs, burning CDs, etc. That's just sitting there in Word or Firefox. Granted, some of that blame goes to Toshiba for the crap battery, but gimping battery life further from the processor end is just asinine. It gives Intel a bad name on notebooks. The girl across from her has a Toshiba Turion TL something or other, also with a crap 4-cell LI battery, and gets about 2 hours a charge, similar light usage.

Bleh.

 

[Zap]

Don't bitch about Intel, just buy the AMD product instead. Vote with your money.

 

[dpopiz]

yeah arkaign is saying what I think. product differentiation is fine; I know that's the best way to support the R&D costs. But making a chip that does the same thing but uses more battery is stupid. I agree Arkaign, they should leave battery life alone and cripple the performance more instead. See, crippling performance only costs one person: the customer. But manufacturing a high-tech cool-running chip that sips power and then just making it WASTE power for no reason costs lots of people.

and btw, disabling speed step isn't the result of faulty circuitry on some chips like with the cache AFAIK. It works fine, they just disable it!

 

[Avalon]

If you're "forced" to get a better battery, that's more money the manufacturer gets from you.

 

[unclebud]

i definitely rather have more power. i only need laptops for the advantage of less space (morons moving stuff around all the time and all). i can't believe i am playing nfsc on a $250 laptop!

 

[IEC]

A laptop is for portability, so disabling SS and having gimped battery life is just a way of "forcing" the consumer to buy more/bigger batteries.

In my case I bought a used I6000D that came with a 6-cell and 9-cell LiIon batteries. The 6 cell lasts me about 2-2.5 hours and the 9 cell lasts me 3-4 hours. Not too shabby.

 

[3chordcharlie]

I would expect to see speedstep in the near-future on laptops which are still single-core as dual-core becomes the norm. For now though, cutting speedstep makes sense - there's a bigger differnece in battery-life than performance between otherwise similar pentium and celeron notebooks, and portability is still the big selling feature of a good notebook, since performance still can't match a much cheaper desktop.