Notebook specs

[amoda]

Hi,

This is my first time to post here and it might be my first time to own a mac. I'm just wondering about the specs of the notebooks. Aren't they all kind of low? The fastest cpu is 2.16ghz which seems to me kind of low for a 2000+ machine. Do the specs differ between macs and pc's? Like 2ghz mac is equal to a 3.2ghz pentium 4? If this is right does it also apply to macbook pro's and other intel based macs?

Sorry about all the questions, it's just that i want to get the right notebook from the very begining.

Thanks!

[shell]

First off, the top of the line chip for Mac notebooks is not 2.16 Ghz, it is dual 2.16 Ghz which means that it is a dual core chip. Just think of it like having two "brains" instead of one. Having two chips in one really speeds things up, and is great for runnig multiple programs at the same time, as most people do.

Second, most laptop chips are not as fast as desktop versions. The reason being that most desktop chips need too much power and are too hot for the small laptop enclosures. Most PC laptops nowadays feature the Pentium M chip by Intel which is only in the 1.5 - 2.2 Ghz region; much less than your typical Pentium 4. However, such chips are not really that much slower than their desktop counterparts; they are specially designed to get more work done with lower clock speeds. A few laptops do have some sort of Pentium 4 in them, but they are not very portable, as they need to be huge to accomadate the power requirement of that chip.

Third, there is more to how fast a chip is then just it's clockspeed. There are just too many other variables that come into play, which I don't to bore you with details, but suffice it to say that it is always a source of contention among computer geeks as to what chip is actually the best, and the arguments can get ugly at times. ;)

Hope that helped.

[MCQ]

The current MacBook Pro uses Intel's Core Duo chips - and if you look around at Dell, HP, etc., you'll see that they're using the same exact CPU on their newest laptops.

A 2 GHz Core Duo is very comparable to a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4. For some benchmarks, you can look at Anandtech. You'll see that on a variety of benchmarks, it is quite competitive to higher-clocked desktop CPUs such as the Pentium 4.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627&p=4

Hope that helps!