[Ilugc] Slightly OT: Acer launches <Rs.30k Linux notebook
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Mon Feb 28 10:02:05 2005
To me, the main draw is that the CPU is a socket-754 Sempron
(*not* the older Socket-A Sempron), so it is electrically
identical to the Athlon 64 2800+ or even the forthcoming
dual-core Athlon 64s. The mobile Semprons run cooler, though.
With some major BIOS hacking, it should be possible to make
this into a 64-bit road warrior. Let's see how this goes.
There's a catch about the 32->64 bit upgrade: In addition to the
BIOS incompatibility, the CPU is physically different from the
64-bit Athlon 64 - the integrated heat-spreader is missing. This
is because the mobile Sempron dissipates only 25W and doesn't need
the heat spreader. But this also means that the desktop Athlon 64
cannot be used in place of the mobile Sempron (the shape of the
heatsink, as well as the power consumption, are different).
Here's a Japanese link to the mobile Sempron 2800+ (1.6 GHz/90 nm/
25 W/128K L1/256K L2/'Palermo' (?) core):
http://www.dei.co.jp/pc_parts/2014119.html
Reviews elsewhere on the web say that it demolishes the Celeron D
(Prescott core) 2.6 GHz on just about any benchmark. Nice, but how
does it fare, clock-for-clock against the Celeron M or Pentium M
aka Centrino II (Dothan core) ?
If only AMD came up with a mobile Athlon 64 which is socket upgrade
to this CPU and consumes only 25W! That would be the end of the
Centrino story :-). In any event, even the 32-bit mobile Sempron
should be able to obliterate just about any Prescott Celeron D or
mobile Pentium 4 that we usually encounter in the Dell, IBM or Toshiba
bricks costing twice as much.
-Siva
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