Laptop for audio. Centrino or P4?

[uptoolate]

I am going to be buying a laptop to use for small mobile projects and also to play soft synths live. I use Sonar and various soft synths, mainly the B4. Are the newer Centrino machines good for audio, or do I need to stick with a Pentium based machine?

Thanks

[habibbijan]

I'm not an expect on the topic, but my vote would be P4 for power, and Centrino for battery life.

[Steve Kerman]

Pentium M, for power and for battery life. Not to be confused with the Mobile P4, which is a totally different critter. The Pentium M is a largely independent design from the Intel Israel Design Center, and is dramatically more efficient than the P4. It gets close to double the performance of a P4 at a given clock rate, and it does it with a substantially lower power draw.

[uptoolate]

Thanks for the info. Do you guys know of compatability issues with the Pentium M and most audio apps?

[habibbijan]

I could be wrong, but I've yet to hear of any. In this case, I would interpret no news as good news.

Good luck. Let us know on what you decide.

[Diego E]

Hi, I don't remember the site where I read a review of a guy using a centrino laptop as a DAW, and results were all in all better than the P4, the laptop was an IBM T40.
By the way, I will be getting a new one (IBM T40) and will load it with Cubase SX 2, Kontact, and some other soft synths such as Stylus and FM7.
If interested I can let you guys know how good (or bad ...) worked out.

Tks,
D

[electron]

Sorry to repeat but does that mean to say that Pentium M outperforms the P4 even with the 'hyperthreading' technology?

[Steve Kerman]

First off, I need to admit a brain burp here: For "Centrino" in the question, I read "Celeron," and my response was based on that reading. As I understand it, the processor in the Centrino chipset is the Pentium M.

Electron, there are really two parts to your question. First, the fastest processors in the Pentium 4 lineup are faster than the fastest processors in the Pentium M family. But, at 100+ watts of thermal dissipation for the fastest Pentium 4s, I doubt that you're going to see them in laptops.

It's a little difficult to compare the performance of the two families because different programs run at different relative speeds on them. Tom's Hardware Guide about a year ago ran extensive benchmarks comparing a 1.6 GHz Pentium M to a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4. The result was that they were pretty similar--some programs ran faster on the Pentium M, and some ran faster on the Pentium 4. But the Pentium M had much better battery lifetime. (I don't know where I saw the "close to double the performance" that I put in my original post--the THG test shows about 35-40% clock-to-clock improvement over the P4.)

Regarding Hyperthreading: It depends on whether your software can make use of multiple processors. Hyperthreading basically is a clever scheme for running two execution threads on the same hardware, which looks to the software like there are two separate CPUs running. This doesn't give anywhere near 2X the performance, though--there is a lot of competition between the two threads for the same hardware resources.

The vast majority of the application software out there is designed to run on a single processor, so they never even see the Hyperthreading capability. Referring back to uptoolate's original question about SONAR, I looked over Cakewalk's web site, and didn't see any indication that SONAR can make use of multiple processors, so the Hyperthreading in the P4 is probably irrelevant. I qualify that with "probably" because I don't know how the plugin mechanisms work, and, depending on how that was implemented, it's conceivable that plugins might run in their own tasks, which could be scheduled on different CPUs.