It's been months now, I've waited, and waited and waited. I chose then changed my mind countless times.
And finally found this.
This is really a bad time to buy a laptop.
Why?
Well, this is real hard to explain but I'll try.
I'll try to focus on CPUs and leave the rest of the topic for future posts..
PIV: probably the most powerful, the fastest the kick-ass the whatever. Problem is Battery life is next to none. Keep in mind That we're talking laptops here, not portables, to me (do not flame me) battery life IS really important. Any change in the near future? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? Another thing: since you want to kick ass, you need a kick ass PIV, the best, the fastest PIV money can buy. But that's exactly what you need: money, and quite a lot of it. The future? well, we all know that Intel has the PM/Centrino wagon to push on the laptop track. So I suppose is quite safe to say that the only improvements we'll ever get from PIVS on laptops is more power and less battery.
Pentium M: As we said Pentium IV are fast. Possibly the fastest around. But what does this mean? I took my time and had a look to thousands of benchmarks, reviews, tests and so on. Sure PIVs are really fast, but Pentium M lags behind only in those tasks that require HT or rely a lot on bus transfers. In other tests, well, the gap is really not much. And when I say not much I mean that the final user won't probably even feel the difference. Even when you compare Pentium Ms with PIV on pure brute force tests (like Dhrystone and Whetstone) the results are quite surprising. Then you can add battery life onto the equation. And then price. And you'll realize that you can buy a fairly decent machine under 2000$ with plenty of power and plenty of battery life. So everything is just fine: we have to buy a Centrino laptop. Nope. Enters Dothan.
The new Pentium M is supposed to be faster than Banias (current PM) while guarantee the same battery life. More on that, if the difference between the PIVs and the PMs is quite narrow today, what will happen with Dothan? The gap would remain the same, you might say, because the PIVS will be upgraded as well. Sure, but fitting a desktop PIV into a lappy is not an easy task, and it might just be getting more difficult as we go on. Newer PIVs will be more powerful, but maybe more powerhungry and even more hot. We might get to the point when building a lappy on a new PIV would be simply not practical. So we buy Dothan. But it's not out yet. All you can do is buy a "Dothan Ready" laptop. Which means you have to swap the current Banias chip you bought for a new (and pricey) Dothan chips when is ready. I think this is quite a waste of money. Think about what would happen to current Banias chip prices when the new chips arrive. You might get stuck with an old CPU you can't sell, and you might have bought a second laptop with the price you OVERPAID the new chip (it always happen in the first few months)
A64: urmm.. uurrmmmm.... This is a tricky one. A64s are quite strange family of chips. I would call them the "might" or "might not" chips (again don't flame me, all my desktops are Athlons I really love the chip). Facts are:
Faster than PMs but not as fast as PIVs (lacks HT and believe it or not, there are some nasty applications which actually use the stuff..)
Better battery life than PIV but not as much as the PMs
64bit is good, but is definitely not now. Think about productivity and applications, I'm not talking OSes not in Beta nor Linux. I'm talking applications. I'm talking Office, Photoshop, Macromedia suite, 3dsmax... The latter, for example, is supposed to be upgraded to 64bit sometime in 2006 - 2007... I don't know you, but I feel I could have changed at least two or three machines in the meantime...
And LAST BUT NOT LEAST here comes the main problem. Current A64 notebooks use DTR cpus. Not mobiles. And the same "dilemma" that I had for the PMs comes again: would you risk to buy NOW a chip that in a few months "might" be obsolete? (the "might" is a must here... nobody knows for sure how a Mobile A64 would rate against a DTR chip...)
... And this is just comparing CPUs... now we could talk about screensize, battery technology, cool stuff (like 6 in one readers, integrated digital cameras, Gigabyte ethernet, firewire 800...)
All that said, here are my thoughts: Buy a laptop computer NOW is probably a bad move. In a few months or less you could possibly buy a new, more powerful notebook for the same price, or just the same notebook you want now for a lot less money. Sure it happens all the time with computers, there's a lot of those "wait forever" guys who keep waiting for the next technology, but I'm really not one of them. Fact is, I really think we have to wait a few more time, just to see what's behind the corner.
What do you think? Am I wrong?
And finally found this.
This is really a bad time to buy a laptop.
Why?
Well, this is real hard to explain but I'll try.
I'll try to focus on CPUs and leave the rest of the topic for future posts..
PIV: probably the most powerful, the fastest the kick-ass the whatever. Problem is Battery life is next to none. Keep in mind That we're talking laptops here, not portables, to me (do not flame me) battery life IS really important. Any change in the near future? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? Another thing: since you want to kick ass, you need a kick ass PIV, the best, the fastest PIV money can buy. But that's exactly what you need: money, and quite a lot of it. The future? well, we all know that Intel has the PM/Centrino wagon to push on the laptop track. So I suppose is quite safe to say that the only improvements we'll ever get from PIVS on laptops is more power and less battery.
Pentium M: As we said Pentium IV are fast. Possibly the fastest around. But what does this mean? I took my time and had a look to thousands of benchmarks, reviews, tests and so on. Sure PIVs are really fast, but Pentium M lags behind only in those tasks that require HT or rely a lot on bus transfers. In other tests, well, the gap is really not much. And when I say not much I mean that the final user won't probably even feel the difference. Even when you compare Pentium Ms with PIV on pure brute force tests (like Dhrystone and Whetstone) the results are quite surprising. Then you can add battery life onto the equation. And then price. And you'll realize that you can buy a fairly decent machine under 2000$ with plenty of power and plenty of battery life. So everything is just fine: we have to buy a Centrino laptop. Nope. Enters Dothan.
The new Pentium M is supposed to be faster than Banias (current PM) while guarantee the same battery life. More on that, if the difference between the PIVs and the PMs is quite narrow today, what will happen with Dothan? The gap would remain the same, you might say, because the PIVS will be upgraded as well. Sure, but fitting a desktop PIV into a lappy is not an easy task, and it might just be getting more difficult as we go on. Newer PIVs will be more powerful, but maybe more powerhungry and even more hot. We might get to the point when building a lappy on a new PIV would be simply not practical. So we buy Dothan. But it's not out yet. All you can do is buy a "Dothan Ready" laptop. Which means you have to swap the current Banias chip you bought for a new (and pricey) Dothan chips when is ready. I think this is quite a waste of money. Think about what would happen to current Banias chip prices when the new chips arrive. You might get stuck with an old CPU you can't sell, and you might have bought a second laptop with the price you OVERPAID the new chip (it always happen in the first few months)
A64: urmm.. uurrmmmm.... This is a tricky one. A64s are quite strange family of chips. I would call them the "might" or "might not" chips (again don't flame me, all my desktops are Athlons I really love the chip). Facts are:
Faster than PMs but not as fast as PIVs (lacks HT and believe it or not, there are some nasty applications which actually use the stuff..)
Better battery life than PIV but not as much as the PMs
64bit is good, but is definitely not now. Think about productivity and applications, I'm not talking OSes not in Beta nor Linux. I'm talking applications. I'm talking Office, Photoshop, Macromedia suite, 3dsmax... The latter, for example, is supposed to be upgraded to 64bit sometime in 2006 - 2007... I don't know you, but I feel I could have changed at least two or three machines in the meantime...
And LAST BUT NOT LEAST here comes the main problem. Current A64 notebooks use DTR cpus. Not mobiles. And the same "dilemma" that I had for the PMs comes again: would you risk to buy NOW a chip that in a few months "might" be obsolete? (the "might" is a must here... nobody knows for sure how a Mobile A64 would rate against a DTR chip...)
... And this is just comparing CPUs... now we could talk about screensize, battery technology, cool stuff (like 6 in one readers, integrated digital cameras, Gigabyte ethernet, firewire 800...)
All that said, here are my thoughts: Buy a laptop computer NOW is probably a bad move. In a few months or less you could possibly buy a new, more powerful notebook for the same price, or just the same notebook you want now for a lot less money. Sure it happens all the time with computers, there's a lot of those "wait forever" guys who keep waiting for the next technology, but I'm really not one of them. Fact is, I really think we have to wait a few more time, just to see what's behind the corner.
What do you think? Am I wrong?
