Centrino vs. Celeron

pe-pa-po

Hi all,
I'm going to be purchasing a laptop soon and was just wondering whats the difference between a celeron processor and a centrino one? it just struck me as odd seeing as how the laptops with celerons are generally cheaper. btw the laptop will be used for college so wi-fi etc is important.
Thanks in advance!

Gilgamesh

I would go for the centrino every time,
Centrino is moreless a combo of Intel chipsets including the Pentium M Processor, whihc is pretty much the most kickass chip for laptops as it integrates great performance with long battery life.
Man I should work for intel's Ad department

Tom Dunne

pe-pa-po wrote:

it just struck me as odd seeing as how the laptops with celerons are generally cheaper

That's the idea

Celerons are the type of processors Aldi or Lidl would sell, if they were in the processor business. They are missing extra features of normal Pentium 4's to make them cheaper. These missing features include performance. So a Celeron would be fine for basic word processing or internet, but utterly useless for tasks such as games and video editing.

Centrino's on the other hand, while not as powerful as Pentium 4's, are designed for laptops, so consume less power, therefore maximising battery life. They come with WiFi built in as standard. You are trading battery life for performance.

To be honest, Centrino's have plenty of horsepower and you wouldn't notice the difference between them and a Pentium 4.

Splinter

got a 1.7 centrino myself and its an awesome beast, get the best part of 3&1/2 hours battery out of it, spend the extra,ul b happier u did

maidhc

Just to throw the cat amoung the pidgeons:

I have a P4 desktop (a few actually!), a P-M Low Voltage Laptop (Dell Latitude x300, A centrino if you like, but it has a Broadcom Wireless card) and a Celeron-M Laptop (Dell Inspiron 2200).

With normally day to day use; there is no difference. It is also interesting to note that the Celeron does not generate a whole lot more heat than the low voltage P-M and the battery lasts longer. I know the battery issue is due to the x300 having a tiny battery, but still I would say the Cel-M more than holds its own.

As far as I know the only thing a Celeron -M lackes compared to its Pentium cousin is speedstep; i.e. it can't throttle back and save battery. I'm not sure how massive an effect this has in anycase.

I was encoding DVD's the other day, as I said in a previous post. The P4 2.8 averaged about 4,800kb/s while the Celeron did 3,700. For the record the laptop also has a slower hard drive, and 1/3 the memory. I would say it more than holds its own.

Having said that I would probably buy a P-M first if I had the money, but not on the basis of a huge speed boost; only for the same reason people buy Audi's rather than Skoda's and Jags rather than Fords. Nicer badge for pretty much the same thing.

netman

Centrino will actually outperform a much higher clocked Pentium 4 in most tasks. It's simply a very well designed chip, which does more in less cycles.

Gaming is a bad example, as most processing is done on the GPU side, and Centrino laptops don't usually come with a dedicated graphics card. (it's usually integrated into the chipset).

Also, Lidl, Aldi and a lot of other brands use desktop processors for their laptops. The reason is simple - they're much cheaper. They also have a higher thermal dissipation and need more power, so you end up with a hotter (literally) laptop with a lower battery life, and since they have to deal with the issue of heat they are usually noisy because of the small whiny fans. If you're getting a Celeron laptop, have a look and see if it's Celeron M or Celeron. A world of a difference there. Celeron M is based on Centrino core (Pentium M) and has a lower clock speed and less cache. It's also very power efficient. Celeron however is based on the Pentium 4 core, has a much higher clock and a completely different architecture, much slower pipeline, so don't be fooled by the MHz or GHz you see.

1.2 GHz Celeron M has a thermal design power of 20.8W, where a 2.8 GHz Celeron has TDP of 73W. That's a lot of heat dumped into the small laptop case and a lot of juice drained from the battery.

I have a Dell laptop at home, nothing special, but it's Centrino, and the fan stays off most of the time. Even while playing videos, hooked up to the telly, it stays cool enough with no fans. It has the smallest battery (most lightweight, 6 cell i think) and typically runs for about 2.5h on a full charge. If I wanted, I could get two 8-cell batteries for it and have a run time of 8-9h at full charge. No Celeron will do that

dearg_doom

I get over five hours of normal oficey type work out of my Centrino:D

BUT:

if it's just for typing/surfing the web etc.. I'd well recomend the Celeron-M if ye need to watch the pennies. It will have WiFi I'm sure too.

The Centrino is great and all, but is only really needed if you're gonna be playing new games etc.. But for most people who're just going to be typing/surfing/etc it's like having a Lamborghini when a Skoda would do:)

pe-pa-po

thanks guys

maidhc

My Celeron M runs for about 2.5hrs, but Dell gave it a NI-MH battery. A Li-ion is supposed to give the same machine 4hrs. Fan rarely comes on.

The Latitude X300, even though it has a low voltage Pentium M only does 2 hrs, which isn't great. Its fan isnt audible!

sceptre

maidhc wrote:

The Latitude X300, even though it has a low voltage Pentium M only does 2 hrs, which isn't great. Its fan isnt audible!

That's because the battery is [strike]crap[/strike]built for portability. Adding the extended battery (sticks out the back) apparently extends the battery time to between 5 and 6 hours. With a weight gain of about 300 grammes.

maidhc strikes me as the kind of common sense chap who, despite his comments about Skodas and Audis, went for the better wireless card in his X300 making his machine officially a "mere" Pentium-M powered machine rather than something with a nice Centrino sticker. Of course it's got the secret advantage of being better than a Centrino which probably helps. Shocked that Dell put a Ni-Mh battery in your other machine though, my four year old Inspiron came with Li-Ion and I'm pretty sure the IBM I had before came with both Ni-Mh and Li-Ion batteries (though the Compaq I had before that back around 1997 had only Ni-Mh) so the older battery tech has been well supplanted.



The Pentium-M's a great chip. I'd probably be accused of fanboi-ism if I sang its praises as I'd like (mostly because it tends to kick ass and will probably be developed long after Intel realises that the long pipeline on the desktop P4 is a millstone and starts developing a (probably renamed) chip with P4-M architecture properly for desktops, dropping the current P4 development in its favour). It's not necessarily, as has been mentioned by others, a chip that all that many people actually need when there's a good alternative (see below) at a rather cheaper price available

A Celeron-M machine will come with wireless (and bluetooth) if you want it to. It'll probably come with it anyway. If you're really just going to be using it for college stuff (were you going to try playing Doom 3 on a general-usage for-college-purchased notebook anyway?), it's worth considering whether the price difference, which can be significant, is worth it for what may well just be a sticker and different logo on the boot screen based on your projected usage when you could just spend the extra cash on a built-in DVD writer or a personal laser printer instead (I hate inkjets for various reasons and I hate driving to college (or walking a few extra yards and queuing) just to print a few project pages).

I'm not trying to push you either way, just towards considering what you want based on what you want it for. For almost all users who'll be using a machine mainly or exclusively for office-style apps, email and internet, a Celeron processor will do very well indeed. The Celerons once had a very bad name as the early versions (back in the Pentium-II 300Mhz days, get with the times, nay-sayers not present on this thread yet) came with no L2 cache. These days, while the Pentium-M chips used in the "Centrino" branded notebooks come with a hefty 2megs of L2 cache, the Celerons come with a nice 1meg of L2 cache, four times the amount that was present on the early P4 chips. For most people (and I really mean most, almost everyone buying a laptop without a dedicated graphics card for gaming purposes or heavy (and I mean heavy) database crunchers)) it's not an issue. It may well, and probably isn't, an issue for you.

maidhc

Well the Skoda Octavia, VW Golf and Audi A3 are essentially the same car. Likewise the smaller Jags are bulit around a Ford Mondeo Chassis. But this isnt the thread for this talk

The Ni-MH battery is a bit of a weird feature allright, the Li-Ion is a cheap enough upgrade, but I didn't get to pick the specs. It was originally ordered as an outlet machine for €300. By the time I got it it was a new machine with a 3yr guarantee and a carry case. I cant complain, but I expect to return the battery before the end of the 12 months batt warrantee they give.

To echo sceptre's words, a personal laser printer is perhaps the single most useful investment any person starting college can make, and a more worthy investment that a faster processor.