R51

is it possible to OC an IBM R51 laptop?
also, the 1.6 pentium-m
is that just a Pentium 3 with a bigger cache and higer clock?

thanks

And also superior cache/prefetch algorithms, sse2, and speedstep technology. It's actually quite competitive in performance when compared to the P4. (The P3 architecture was one of the best ever made, and so this updated version is a very good thing.)

As for overclocking it, I couldn't say. I couldn't find much of anything on google, other than mention of linux bios modding for an older 600e. I also saw in our very own forums some mention of using setfsb to overclock some more recent thinkpad models. I'd definitely proceed with caution, however.

I'm actually considering purchasing something in the R5x line at the moment. If you wouldn't mind posting your experiences in my other thread, I'd be quite appreciative! -- Paul

the reason I asked is that I use Linux and I set the compile flags for P3 or P4.

I had read some posts that the flag for the Pentium-m did the same thing as the pentuim3 flag.

your question: I don't own one yet!
Everyone here in our office does and they seem to love it from a user point of view, but they didn't pay for it so there bias is different.
There are well built, I have had it in my hands and its "fit and finish" was better then my friends Dell.

The Dells are cheaper, so there is the rub....I may get the IBM since they seem to support linux a little more.

I'd use P4 for the compile flags. (What distro are you using?) The other day, I was testing my wife's Celeron-M and compiled with P4 flags with no problems. (Same architecture.) Actually, now that I think of it, I'd do something more like this (if you're using gcc, for instance)

-march=pentium3 (or pentium-m if it's available)
-mcpu=pentium3 (or pentium-m if it's available)
-mmmx
-msse
-msse2 (so that you get the advantages of the P4's sse2 optimizations without being mis-compiled as for their longer pipeline.)

Linux support is definitely nice, too. I hope to put Gentoo on whatever laptop I end up with ... I'm glad you brought that up, as I hadn't even considered it!!!

Thanks for your insight on the laptops. (I'm gaining quite a bit today!!! ) -- Paul

*edit* When I looked here, I saw that there may be some issues with gcc and the pentium-m flag. You might consider doing pentium3 instead. */edit*

As an update to you, it looks like I'll be receiving an R51 next week. Maybe we can compare notes later. I don't plan on overclocking it, but I will research the procedure. -- Paul

I have used Gentoo for the past 3 years.
if you are looking at gentoo then try this thread:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=205355

is there someplace that totally explains the differences in the Intel chips for laptops? I see 715, 350 pentium-m ......

I went to IBMs site to configure a laptop and I didn't know which chip was which(I use AMD chips on desktops) any help is appreciated.
thanks.

The latest versions of gcc support -march=pentium-m. The gcc 3.4.3 manual lists it as an option for -march and -mtune:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3...2d64-Options.html#i386-and-x86_002d64-Options

edit: While the pentium-m was based on the P6 arch (as was the Pentium 3), it is significantly different than the P3. It runs on a different bus, has better branch prediction and prefetch (both like the P4), supports sse2 and defaults to a lower power state (and has other significant power saving features). Check out anandtech's review:
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1800

If you have to choose, I think -march=pentium3 -msse2 would be better than -march=pentium4 (but I have zero experience).

edit2: other changes the p3 include a longer pipeline, a dedicated stack manager, micro-ops fusion, bigger L1 cache (64k instead of 32k) and different associativity in the L2 cache (which is also bigger). It also comes with a reworked, less power hungry chipset.

Thanks for the tips there. Good information.

The one thing that I had run across is that in the early support for the pentium-m flags in gcc/g++, the optimizations were not done very well, to the point where code ran more slowly with the optimizations than without! But from what I've read, those problems have largely been dealt with in the most recent versions of the compiler. So, in part, I'd choose the flag based upon the version of the compiler.

For instance, the Windows mingw port of g++ still uses version 3.2.3. I'm unsure of the version currently shipping with gentoo 2005.0, for instance. (BTW, thanks for that gentoo link! I'm not sure how closely I'll follow it, but I do plan to most likely use gentoo on the new laptop. Then again, I may get lazy and use fedora core or a RH clone.) -- Paul

I run ~x86 gentoo and the latest version there is 3.4.3.20050110-r1 the latest stable version is 3.3.5-r1. As of a couple days ago, it looks like gcc 4 is coming out around the 15th (http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-04/msg00170.html), but it may take a while to make it into portage.