4. Price Comparison: Pentium4-M- Vs Pentium-M Systems

New technologies, such as those promised by the Pentium-M and the Centrino Mobile Technologies, always come at a high cost during their market launches. Pentium-M certainly won't prove to be the exception to the rule. Customers basically won't care. They usually buy a notebook for its particular price, and not for its particular processor. So at this point, we won't get started on the discussion of whether or not mobile processors are worth their price. It's more important to answer the question of whether it will be possible, in the mid-term, to buy a Pentium-M notebook at a price (at similar performance specifications) that's comparable to that of the Pentium 4-M system.

The following table shows you an overview of which Pentium-M processors will be found in which notebooks at which price point or price range, according to Intel.

As you can see from the table, Intel wants to offer the Pentium-M/Banias with clock speeds of 1.6 GHz, 1.5 GHz, 1.4 GHz and 1.3 GHz at the time of the product launch. In Q2 this year, this group should be joined by a 1.7 GHz version. In Q4, the successor Dothan should be ready to go with clock speeds over 1.8 GHz.

The lower two columns only give basic information about the various frequencies of the ULV and LV versions of the Banias and the approximate launch date. If these values are to be believed, then the notebook makers should also be able to offer the corresponding products at the time of the launch, and for all price ranges.

How does the system price of a Banias system compare to that of a Pentium-M notebook? The table below shows the relationship between the target price independent of the Pentium 4-M CPU used.

If a Pentium-M system is supposed to be at the same performance and price level as a Pentium 4-M notebook, as indicated here, then a Pentium-M, clocked at about 500 MHz slower, should perform just as well as the corresponding Pentium 4-M. For the purposes of our test, this means that the 1.6 GHz Pentium-M should be able to hold its own against the 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-M. The test will show us whether this is the case.