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Pentium M or Centrino vs Pentium 4 — Parallax Forums

Pentium M or Centrino vs Pentium 4

whiteoxewhiteoxe Posts: 794
edited 2009-12-01 05:44 in General Discussion
I was reading an opinion or test that a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz chip processing power was equivilent to a Pentium 4 running at 2.4 Ghz. Is this related mostly to the number of transistors in respective chips?

Comments

  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2009-12-01 03:38
    Have you looked at the Wikipedia article discussing the differences (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M)? It's much more complex than just the number of transistors.
  • whiteoxewhiteoxe Posts: 794
    edited 2009-12-01 04:13
    Yeah, I see it is pretty complicated. Not something you can sum up in a sentance. Then there's the issue of multiple core chips standard today. Ive seen comments that many apps run on a single thread so the number of cores is irrelevent. However also seen some test results that show dual core whip single core in most if not all tests. I guess the effiency of the independant cores is also much improved to explain this. I'll have at look at this in wiki.
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2009-12-01 05:44
    Like a lot of things, it all depends on the circumstances. If you're executing something that can't benefit from multiple threads, it won't run faster on a multi-core processor. Most operating systems these days are set up to take advantage of multiple threads if available. If the application is compute-bound and not divisible into multiple threads, there won't be much advantage to multiple cores. Most of the cores will be idle or idle most of the time.
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