Core Duo vs. Core 2 Duo vs. P4

The previous version of a laptop I'm going to buy had an Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83Ghz, but now the updated version has a Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66Ghz. The T5500 is 64-bit-ready, but what difference in performance will I notice when decoding videos and playing games? Is the T5500 slightly slower than the T2400?

My old laptop has a P4 3.06Ghz, which isn't that modern anymore. What is the performance of T5500 compared to this CPU?

The new laptop has a Geforce 7600 graphics card.

Thanks in advance.

 

Well, the 7600 should serve you well. It's a great graphics card. Core Duo has a significant performance improvement over the Pentium M. I haven't tried the C2D yet, but I would choose newer technology over speed anytime.

 

Decoding and encoding actually receive a big improvement from the C2D. XP 64 and vista 64 should see even more of an improvement.
Go with C2D.

 

The solo was a low-shipment manufacture for apple and dell (and a few others) that basically would be a low-cost next-gen chip that would take the place of the Celeron chip in their very low-end notebooks and desktops. Luckily they are usually easily upgraded to their duo counterpart.

I don't even think solo chips made it into the consumer channel...

Basically steer clear of solo. It's not nearly as fast as the duo.


EDIT: Oh and the t5500 is probably 20% faster overall than the p4, but having two full cores means its everyday performance will probably be twice-ish that of the p4... And once you get applications that can use both cores... you'll absolutely smoke that p4 =)

 

poor netburst, I wish I could have a 8ghz pentium 4 in a laptop so It would burn through my legs and I wouldn't have to work anymore.

 

Maybe they should have had a little instant-cold pack on the laptop base anytime you had a Dothan CPU- it would activate once you did something CPU-intensive.... I almost bought a p4 notebook from craigslist, but on testing it at the local $tarbuck$ the thing felt like a reactor in meltdown an inch from my.... 'accessories'. Didn't get that one.

 

The T5XXX series of C2D doesnt have Virtualization Technology, but till now, i dont really know what it's for anyway.

 

This is for sure, your new notebook will have much better battery life.

 

The t5200 and T 5500 don't have virtualisation technology .... T5600 does. Actually, there's very little different b/w the t5600 and the t7200, except that the 5600 has 2 MB cache disabled. Dunno why, tho. Is it some kinda celeron thing? Like when intel branded off the underperforming pentiums as celeron, after bringing their rated clocks down?

 

I have always assumed that the models with less cache were the ones which didn't have all 4MB of cache working when they came off the production line. Intel has also sneaked in a T2060 which has only 1MB cache. You can now buy several notebooks with this CPU, but I have been unable to find it mentioned in any Intel documentation.

John

 

Yup, that's usually (but not always) the case. As far as I know, both the 2 and 4mb models come are built on the same core, which means they all physically have 4MB of cache. So either Intel on purpose disables half the cache on some models (That is sometimes done in order to have a product for the low-end market, without having to lower prices on your high-end models), or as you say, they simply pick the ones where part of the cache doesn't work.

Of course, the same may be the case with virtualisation support. (Although I doubt this takes up a big area on the core, so it probably won't be defective very often.) But with that they may also simply disable it in order to have a "low-end" product to sell without drawing attention away from their high-end models.

 

Core solo should be just as fast as core duo in single threaded apps.

Virtualization technology (Vanderpool) is used when you are emulating multiple OS (VMware)

Core duo t2050 has 2mb cache, just like all others, I dunno where you got that 1mb idea from. It has 533mhz fsb instead of 667.

 

We're treading into dangerous territory here.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1503090

I'd love to see an asus or dell laptop- one with a solo and one with a duo, to see some real benchmarking. Anybody seen something similar? I'm having trouble finding a benchmark report that uses real-world situations as opposed to extreme load. I would disagree with the idea that a solo chip would provide the same performance as a duo. Even applications that don't specifically support multiple threads/cores can still see performance gains.

 

He was referring to the T20 60.

It's a Pentium 'branded' chip that only has 1MB of L2 cache.

 

why would a higher model number have less cache? just wondering

 

I think the T2060 is OEM only, and was made just for the big scale retailers (dell, hp, etc)