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Geek Culture / My 1.73Ghz lap top is faster than my 2.8Ghz desk top.....why?

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thedubdude
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Location: San Jose, Ca.
Posted: 13th Nov 2006 02:58
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Hi Folks,

I just compared compile times between my new lap top and my 2 year old desk top and was shocked that the lap top was 2.6 times faster. Both computers have ~1Gbyte of memory and are running Intel Pentium processors. The desk top is 2.8Ghz and the lap top is 1.7Ghz...Can any one explain why I might be seeing such a discrepency? Thanks.
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indi
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Location: Earth, Brisbane, Australia
Posted: 13th Nov 2006 03:23
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motherboard bus speed in laptops is usually faster.
in a nutshell i would imagine your mobo to have a faster bus speed.

hard drive speeds can also affect this increase.
ram speed as well.
the overall effect can be dramatic as you may have noticed.

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Dazzag
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 09:17
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Also is it a Centrino or AMD effort? Normally these are much faster than the P4 equivelents. When I bought my laptop (2Ghz Dothan single core Centrino) you basically multiplied by about 1.5 to get the P4 equivelent. So about 3Ghz in my case. When I ran that PI software (million decimal places calculation) then on the laptop forums nothing touched my laptop at the time, even a ~3.6Ghz monster was quite a bit off. Then a top of the range tweaked like mad (mine was out of the box) AMD64 effort managed to shave 1 second off my time. 3Ghz P4's were like about 50% slower. Obviously not all apps will work out this way. Most things were faster, but some were slower. Ace chip though, and unsurprisingly they put it in desktops after a while too.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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lagmaster
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 12:31
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centrinos are 1.66-2ghz+.

you might have a dual core lappy. does the job way quicker than most chips in pc's

lagmaster
Devhat IRC Network [href=irc://irc.devhat.net] -> MIRC link <- [/href]
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Dazzag
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 12:36
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Quote: "centrinos are 1.66-2ghz+"
Yes, but they do more per clock cycle than P4's. Look in any online laptop forum (www.whatlaptop.co.uk), and for years they reckon a guide to Centrino's is to multiply by 1.5 to get an approx P4 equivelent (sometimes better, sometimes worse depending on application). This was when everything was single core, so obviously things have changed a bit since (although not really for the vast majority of applications when run on their own).

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Lost in Thought
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 12:56
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Also if you have a hyper-threading processor on the 2.8 and not on the 1.7 your programs will run faster on the 1.7 as the hyper-threading limits the 2.8 to 1.4 (no program can use more than 50%).

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Fallout
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 13:14
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I think the most likely answer is the F4/F5 keys on the desktop are sticky.


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the_winch
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 16:30 Edited at: 13th Nov 2006 16:31
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Quote: "Yes, but they do more per clock cycle than P4's."


Yep the laptop proably has a Pentium 4 m which is very different to a normal P4 used in desktops.

Quote: "Also if you have a hyper-threading processor on the 2.8 and not on the 1.7 your programs will run faster on the 1.7 as the hyper-threading limits the 2.8 to 1.4 (no program can use more than 50%)."


That's not true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthreading

By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
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Lost in Thought
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Posted: 13th Nov 2006 17:01
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Quote: "That's not true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthreading"


I have read that before myself and I assure you it is quite true, if you can't turn off the hyperthreading in your bios. I myself have the same problem. Both of my machines have the same hardware except the MB and processors. I have a 1.0 ghz and a 2.8 ghz (this one is hyperthreading) and the 2.8 only runs slightly faster than the 1.0 as the 1.0 will load to 100% with my game where as the 2.8 will not go over 50%. I tested this with maths only code and not graphics to eliminate as much as possible other than the processors. DBP does not support multithreading. The plus side to this is that no one program can totally lock up your machine as you still have the other 50% to exit with.

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Me!
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Posted: 14th Nov 2006 20:20
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more like Celeron vs something useful (Pentium, Athlon etc), it never ceases to amaze me how slow my "faster" 2.8ghz Celeron laptop is compared to a 2.0ghz Amd Athlon machine, in fact in normal use the AMD seems as fast as a Pentium 3.1ghz hyperthreading desktop, even when it comes down to sustained number crunching like Mpeg compression or video encoding there doesn`t seemm that much difference in speed (if any), although I havent actualy timed em, but thats the impression they give.



Dr Frankenstiens mum told him to make some new friends, not knowing where this was going to lead.
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Dazzag
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Posted: 14th Nov 2006 23:16
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It's not the impression, it is fact. Much like Centrinos AMD processors do more per clock cycle than a P4. It is the reason they call them names like XP3200 to show it approximates (different per application much like the Centrinos) a 3.2Ghz P4 even though the actual Ghz is a lot lower than that.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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thedubdude
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Posted: 16th Nov 2006 21:32
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Well I tried turning off Hyper Threading in my BIOS and found about a 40% speed improvement on my DBPro compile time. Unfortunately, with hyper threading off launching parallel applications (like internet explorer) while compliling, was incredibly slow. I finally decided to turn the hyper threading back on.

As I previously mentioned, my computer is about 2 years old...have desk top computers gotten much faster in the last two years?...if so how much faster? Thanks.
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