1. Intentional Restraint

Virtually unnoticed, Intel launched a new processor in early January, the Celeron M, which is geared primarily for low-cost notebooks.

Typical of Intel's nomenclature, the name "Celeron" signifies "a cheap but high-performance and fast CPU," while the "M" indicates it is a derivative of the Pentium M, codenamed Banias.

The Mobile Celeron is the well-known, tried-and-proven processor in low-priced notebooks, but the newcomer Celeron M has about as much in common with it as a Mobile Pentium 4 M CPU has in common with the Pentium M: absolutely nothing. While the Pentium 4 M and its "cheaper" brother the Mobile Celeron are both based on the Northwood core, and consequently on a desktop CPU design, the Celeron M (Banias core) is a processor spin-off that was specifically developed for notebooks. The most important differences between the Pentium M and the Celeron M - besides the price of course - are the L2 cache, which at 512 kB is only half the size, and the lack of "Enhanced Speedstep" energy saving technology.

To what degree the lack of these two features will affect the battery time and performance is something that we look at in this review.

The tests were based on the Latitude D505, which Dell offers with a choice of a 1.2 GHz Celeron M or the 1.4 GHz Pentium M. The price difference for a configuration that is otherwise the same is approximately $100, which turns out to be almost exactly the price difference of the two CPUs.

There is one thing we can determine without testing, though: a notebook that is equipped with a Celeron M, a Pentium M-compatible Intel chipset and a 802.11b WLAN module from Intel is not supposed to carry the Centrino logo. Not everything has to be a Centrino, which also seems to be Intel's opinion.