portable, best laptop processor

I need to get a new laptop and was looking at Systemax
(from simply) because I can get one to my specification.

Its used for development. I shall go for 80G hard drive
and 1G memory. I haven't a clue what processor to go for though.

I read all sorts of stories about Celerons and Mobile processors
and Pentium M's. And even though I use it for development I
want it to work with linux distributions more or less out of the
box and don't particularly want to waste time finding drivers
for non generic things and building kernels and so on.

So what's my best option ? I was thinking a mobile Pentium M
(but not celeron) so I have off-chip wireless and graphics,
good battery life and not too much fiddling around to get
it to work. But I'm not sure I understand the differences
too well.

Questions

1. is that a sensible option ?

2. would a celeron work out of the box ? (but maybe without
the extra on-chip stuff ?) would I have trouble with the graphics
and drivers etc.

Thanks

andy

> So what's my best option ? I was thinking a mobile Pentium M

You might also want to consider the AMD processors. They tend to be
cheaper for the same performance (and you get 64bit support to boot,
although you probably don't care and won't use it).


Stefan

The AMD64s are much faster than the Intel processors however the Nvidia
Nforce3-150 chipset seems to be a bit touchy. Fedora Core 2 (32 bit) with
a custom 2.6.8.1 kernel (built for K7) seems to be working but I haven't
done enough with it since I built this kernel to see if all of my problems
have been solved. I've had trouble with the mouse and with the ethernet
hanging up on me with Mandrake 10.0 64 bit and with the standard FC2
2.6.8.1 kernel. In a few days I'll know if all of the issues are solved.

In the Intel world the Pentium M is the chip of choice for laptops, it's
much more effecient than the P4. Intel's chipsets are also better
supported. But for pure speed the Intel chips don't come close to the
Athlon 64, the 3400+ (2.2GHz, 1M cache) in my laptop is as fast as a 5GHz
Xeon.

Not to start a processor debate, but what do you base this
statement on?

Here's a Tom's Hardware article with benchmarks...
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040106/athlon64_3400-35.html
Boiled down, I read that the Athlon is better in 3-D apps but
the P4 beats it in most other benchmarks. Of course, AMD is the
choice of gamers and overclockers. But neither counts on a
laptop.

As far as Linux goes, the compatibility will nearly never be a
processor problem. I've never seen a kernel not work on processor
_ for example. The kernel could be recompiled to perform BETTER
on some processor family.

It's usually the peripherals that suffer in the Linux install.
The newer or the rarer the hardware, the more difficult getting
drivers or installing them. It's not a matter of what processor
you choose but rather the overall system hardware.

Dell does use some custom hardware and proprietary stuff. Because
it's not off-the-shelf, drivers may not be immediately available
(i.e. my 1300 wireless card didn't have drivers under linux for
a long time).

The best way to go about this is to search on the system and
"Linux" using google. If you search on "D800 Linux" you'll come
up with a page like this one:
http://www.mikehardy.net/linux_latitude_d800/
It's the perfect way to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I'd shoot for the P-M by the way. I'm a D800 owner.

I've been doing extensive benchmarks on my Athlon 64 3400+ doing Verilog
simulation, Xilinx FPGA place and routes and GCC builds. If there isn't
any IO, i.e. a verilog simulation that doesn't save a .trn file,the Athlon
64 is nearly twice as fast as by 2.66GHz Xeon (1.95 to be exact). When I
do a verilog simulation that saves a large .trn file (340 Mbyte) the
Athlon 64 is still 40% faster than the Xeon, and remember this is a laptop
with a 4400 RPM disk vs a server with a 7200RPM disk. Doing a big GCC make
the Athlon 64 is 77% faster than the Xeon. Sites like Tom's and Anand
focus mostly on games and multimedia applications. The P4 can hold it's
own on games because those make very heavy use of the multimedia
instructions. Most applications that a developer will run don't make any
use of the multimedia instructions. The results that I've seen are typical
of both hardware and software developer performance.

I've had the laptop for a little while now and I've got it running
solidly. I had to do a couple of things to get everything to work, here is
a summary

Compaq R3000z, Athlon 64 3400+, 1G DDR, 60G drive, 1680x1050 screen,
Nvidia graphics, Broadcom 54G wireless, XP Pro (just in case I ever need
Windows for anything, XP home is $49 cheaper but if I have to own a copy
of Windows I rather it's one that works), and a worthless winmodem. ($1525
from http://www.hpshopping.com ).

Fedora Core 2, 32 bit version (necessary because I use Win4Lin and
ndiswrapper). The 64 bit version works fine but I didn't see any important
performance differences so I'm running 32 bit because of the
aforementioned Win4Lin requirement.

2.6.8.1 kernel. I built this myself with the Win4Lin patches and I
targeted it to the K7 (Athlon). I had to disable register parameters
because they caused Win4Lin to core dump. I also disabled preemptive
schedualing (at NeTraverse's suggestion). I turned on the K8
power management and the userspace clock speed control (works great, you
can switch the clock speed from 800MHz upto 2.2GHz with a simple echo to

/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

for example,

echo 2200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

Installed ndiswrapper and the Windows XP driver for the Broadcom 54G
802.11B/G card. Works perfectly. Very easy to setup.

Installed the Nvidia driver. Works fine once I got the kernel issues
ironed out.

Had to hack the xorg.conf file to make the 1680x1050 screen work, do a
Google search for 1680x1050 and Linux and you'll find the instructions on
what to do (the webpage poster has a Dell Centrino with the same screen).

The only thing that will never work is the winmodem. I've ordered a USB to
serial port adapter form Keyspan (they actively support Linux according to
both the kernel documentation and their website). I'll use an external
modem when I travel.

General Schvantzkoph < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > writes:

Wow, this looks great. You were able to use the NVidia video under X,
and the Broadcom wireless stuff, without needing any binary-only
drivers? Is there some reason you didn't go for the 1920x1200 screen?
You didn't get the DVD+R -- do you know of any problems with it?

I remember looking at some HP/Compaq Athlon-64 notebook at Circuit
City and finding out that it needed a proprietary X server and DVD+R
drivers, so I lost interest. I guess I can decide not to care about
the Winmodem but I do need to use the screen.

Thanks.

The open source Nvidia drivers work with all Nvidia cards, those worked
out of the box (except for the xorg.conf fiddling which is required
because Xfree86 and Xorg don't understand the 1680x1050 display). I
installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers which are faster, Nvidia provides
a script which compiles the drivers for the kernel that you are using and
installs the driver. You have to edit the xorg.conf file to invoke the
proprietary drivers, but that's pretty trivial. The graphics processor is
the bottom of the Nvidia line. It's fast enough unless you want to run
games (I don't). I didn't get the 1920x1200 because it's too big, I'm
using the laptop as a laptop not as a desktop and I want to be able to
carry it without a forklift. If I had it to do over I'd get the standard
15" screen, it's big enough and easier to read. I didn't get the DVD+R
because I don't need it, DVD + CDRW is enough. In fact CDRW would have
been enough but the DVD future proofs it. I haven't tried to write a CD
yet, didn't occur to me it even try that, guess I'll try that tomorrow.

The Broadcom chip does require binary drivers. In fact it requires an
XP driver, there is no Linux native driver. I used Ndiswrapper which
bridges XP drivers to Linux. Ndiswrapper works really well and it's
surprisingly easy to install. Their instructions are clear and the install
scripts work without a hitch. Mandrake includes Ndiswrapper in the
distribution, Fedora doesn't. For Fedora you have to install it yourself.

Mandrake 10.0 gave me some stability problems. 10.0 use an early kernel,
2.6.3, which isn't very AMD64 friendly. Mandrake 10.1, which is at beta 2,
uses the 2.6.8.1 kernel so I expect that it will work much better.
Mandrake also includes the proprietary Nvidia drivers in the boxed sets
and in the downloads for Mandrakeclub silver members.

yes, I realise this but since the Celeron (to the best of my
understanding) has more peripheral stuff on-chip (wireless,
graphics) and is newer it seems not as good a bet as Pentium M
unless I want to do lots of hacking which I don't particularly.
I'm getting older, I want at least my basic hardware to
work out-of-the-box these days so I can focus my energy
on *productive* programming. And using binary-only drivers
is *bad* news*.

If I did go for a Celeron I would also need to be able to
disable those on-chip-functions that don't work (such
as wireless) - I expect I could do that but I'm not 100%
sure. Cost is not an issue, I just want a robust setup
so I don't have to hack with on those too much. Using
Intel binary drivers (I understand that the celeron requires
that) is not a good direction to provide that robustness at
this point in my view judged from what I can find on the net.
Sure, I could probably get it to work but there are better
uses for my energy.
On the other hand, if I knew the celeron was best for some
other reason (maybe uses less power than Pentium M ?) and
the non-useable functions could easily be over-ridden
(e.g. with wireless pcmcia - not sure about graphics???)
then I'd go for one of those.

About 6-7 years ago I bought a PICO from Simply (uk company).
This is a generic box that they built to your own spec, you
told them what processor, what ram, disk etc. My son
has it now and its still going strong and has given no-fault
service all that time. Built like a brick but it has
done its job well.

Now they build machines called Systemax and the plan is
to go for one of those (the Tourbook) with the hope I can
get at least three years or so before its obsolete.
My current laptop is a compaq armada chosen for its basic
generic-ness and its been solid and good too but is on
its last legs now.
I have the choice of starting the build they do with a
Pentium M or a Celeron based unit.


I know this stuff but nobody has documented Systemax and
anyway they are all different as they are built to
your own spec. I'd have to find out the proposed motherboard
and processor, find a machine that has the same one and
look for that. This is tough. So I'll check out processor
(never had to do that in the old days!), graphics and
presume the rest will work or be overrideable with
external (pcmcia or usb) peripherals.

Yep, that's my judgement of the best shot too - the
Celeron's are too leading edge at the moment if
I just want a stable out-of-the-box generic solution
that's going to run for years.

Thanks for everyone's comments, I think they confirmed
what I was thinking.

Cheers

andy

bogart < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > writes:

You're thinking of Centrino. Celeron is an "economy" Pentium II/III
with a smaller on-chip cache and has no compatibility problems.

oops, yes I am. Sorry - throughout the entire thread I meant Centrino.
Does this change anything ?

andy

oops, yes I am. Sorry - throughout the entire thread I meant Centrino.
Does this change anything ?

andy

>

yes it is, though i don't see why centrino is being hyped so much. People
should try and understand that centrino is nothing more than marketing
hype and the name being used by intel for their combination of the
processor, wireless lan card and the graphics chip, i think. The processor
is a little different than the standard ones as it has more cache. But
most people would be perfectly fine with a normal P4 Mobile processor
instead of the centrino.


The celeron would work fine. Wether or not you require extra drivers
depends on the rest on the hardware in the notebook. The processor won't
need any drivers as such.

HTH
-- Sharninder

The Pentium M (Centrino) is a very different processor then the P4. It has
a much shorter pipeline and is much more effecient, it's power consumption
is a small fraction of the P4 for similar or better performance. That said
the best choice is the mobile Athlon 64, it blows the socks off of
anything that Intel produces and in it's Cool & Quiet mode it has decent
battery life.