laptop processors...

[Lee Hetherington <ilh@lcs.mit.edu>]

| I just timed my Thinkpad 760CD (120MHz, 40MB) for a build and timing test
| of a project, and my Zeos 100MHz Pentium 32MB home system on the same.

I ran some benchmarks a while ago (floating point and integer, no
output/graphics), and a 90MHz Pentium PCI desktop machine was definitely
faster than a 120MHz 760C, at least when the memory system was being
exercised.

I found that for some programs a 75MHz Pentium 755 was very close to the
same speed my 120MHz Pentium 760.

| What is the point?  Well, if you are thinking about buying a laptop vs.
| a PC, you should know that the laptop architecture cuts corners on
| performance.  How?  I suppose, either no L2 cache, no EDO ram, or both.
| There might be other problems with the buses or something.

I believe the 760C and 760CD have 256K L2 cache and EDO ram.  The
problem I think is the bus: not PCI.

| If/when I buy my own laptop, I will probably aim for lower performance
| processor, if it is any cheaper or (more to the point) faster delivery.
| The memory and hard disk speeds and graphics are the bottlenecks on these
| things, most of the time...

Either that or maybe consider the 760E or 760ED machines with PCI.  Has
anybody run anything on these machines?

                                Lee Hetherington
                                ilh@lcs.mit.edu