Centrino's

I have a friend looking at buying a laptop and he is looking at this Intel Centrino. Now the sales person told him that this 1.3 G centrino is comparable to 2 2.2 to 2.5 G P4......
Yet the Centrino has nearly double the battary life and 1/2 the speed in G's......doesnt seam right to me but thats why im asking you INTEL guys
So how good are these centrinos and are they worth?

First of all Centrino isn't only a processor - it's a "mobile platform" consisting of 3 things:

1. Intel Pentium-M processor
2. Intel 855M chipset
3. Intel Calexico wireless

The proc itself is named "Intel Pentium M Processor". Only when u have all the 3 components inside a notebook, you can call it "Centrino Mobile Technology".

The Centrino platform was designed as a low power consumption CPU. The pipeline of the Pentium M Processor is shorter than the P4's, and it can do more in each clock cycle. So a lower GHz for a Pentium M doesn't necessarily mean lower performance; on top of that it has 1MB L2 cache vs 512KB for Pentium 4.

You can read some reviews on the net. U will see that perf of a 1.3/1.4 GHz model is comparable to P4 2.2/24 models in most cases, and yes, power consumption is much less, making it possible to have a longer battery life.

It's a better bet to go for a Centrino notebook, as they are thinner and lighter, offer longer battery life, good performance, and have wireless connectivity.and .

I have one, and mine is comparable to a Athlong XP 1800+...
I'd pick centrino over anything, cause of less heat, more battery life, and good performance. with all those feats

A sales tech tried to tell me the top of the line Centrino, like 1.7GHz, was comparable to a 3.3Ghz P4. LoL

I recently bought a Dell latitude D600 with a 1.6 gig pentium M. I couldn't be happier with it. If you look at Dell's site you will see benchmarks taken directly from Intel that show a 1.6GHz PM being roughly equivalent to a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. I haven't run a whole suite of benchmarks on mine, but I do run Seti and I can tell you this - my 1.6GHz laptop is hanging right up there with my best 3.4GHz P4C desktop machine. I've also run the system on a battery for upwards of 6 hours. The cooling fan is virtually silent and hardly ever comes on. I'm just real impressed all the way around.

its a great cpu... but too bad the dell 600m gets horrible batt life on it though... i get like 3 hours 20 min. slightly above avg than other comps i think. I'd expect 4 hours but oh well... it was cheap anyways.

Weird I've got the Latitude D600 with 1.6GHz part and it ran on the battery for about 6 hours the other day. I did order mine with the larger battery option though.

you mean with the 6 cell batt or something? Using one battery right? the 600M just has poor battery performance compared to other centrinos. A IBM Laptop goes up to 6 hours on a single batt.

Ohhhh you've got the inspiron... nevermind.

acourding to MobileMark 2002 a Centrino Notebook with a 1.3 Ghz cpu out performed a pentium 4 mobile proessor at 2.5 ghz
the Centrino got about 5hr and 1 min battery life and the mobile pentium 4 got about 2hr 33min

Does the Dell 300m notebook have Centrino Technology?

I believe so, i think all "M" models have centrino.