Re: thinkpad 760c speed

[Sandy Meltzer <sandy@surf.com>]

>I guess my primary question to you all is should I expect such a large
>drop in performance going from a 90MHz pentium desktop machine (PCI bus
>I guess) to 120MHz pentium laptop w/o PCI?  It would seem that the
>thinkpad's bus and memory are a lot slower (perhaps for power reasons).

Hi Lee,

I think it's a combination of factors; bus speed, support chips, memory 
size and cache design, bus design (VLB vs PCI), disk speed (controller 
design and hard drive), video design and support memory, etc. that 
generally cause laptops to "benchmark" slower compared to similar 
desktop system.  I guess this is the price of miniaturization.

Based on most of the computer magazine "Windows" benchmarks I've read 
(i.e.Winstone, Wintune, etc.), today's fastest laptops still appear to 
be about 25%-50% slower compared to the fastest desktop systems with 
similar configurations.  If you read these benchmarks carefully, you
will see that desktop and laptop performance varies within a specified
range of results and often overlap (fast laptops may actually be faster
then slower desktops, but are ALWAYS slower then the fastest desktops).

On the other, slower laptop benchmark scores doesn't necessarily mean 
that the "perceived" speed we see during actual use "appears" that much
slower.  Obviously, depends on your application. In you case, your Unix 
test program clearly shows the performance difference between laptop and
desktop systems...probably a worst case situation.  Frankly Lee, you might
want to confirm that there is actually a 120MHz Pentium under the hood. ;-)

The real problem here is marketing.  Manufacturers will say and do anything
to sell their laptops and, unfortunately, many magazines "go along with the
program" to maximize their revenue from these advertising dollars.  Not
necessarily false advertising, but the ads are presented in such a way
that leaves readers (you and me) the impression that a particular laptop 
can easily replace your desktop system - therefore it must be as fast or
faster.  Might be true depending on the quality of your desktop machine.

Personally, I don't expect the fastest desktop performance from my ThinkPads,
but overall I've been VERY pleased with their "perceived" performance running
the applications I bought them for.  I'm sure all of this doesn't make you
feel any better about the performance of your 760C.

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