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I know that the M's are supposed to be better for battery use, but still it seems that the P4's would be better because they are faster. Do the M's somehow work faster/better even though their GHz are lower?
If most of the time I will be plugging into an outlet with a laptop, which is better to get?
That being said, Intel has got a marketing problem on their hands. They have spent years, and probably billions of dollars trying to convince people the MHz is everything when it comes to performace. Mac users, Sun customers, and more recently AMD have come to the realization that MHz, while a contributing factor to overall performance is NOT everything. A Mac (IBM) PowerPC, AMD, or Sun UltraSparc chip can usually outrun an Intel chip of the same MHz clock rate. A few years ago, AMD starting "branding" their chips with the equivilant Intel MHz speed, even though the clock speed is really slower.
Anyway, now that Intel has spent billions marketing the more MHz is always better myth, they too now have an architecture which bucks their historic trend and hype.
I am sure other people can go into the specifics of the M series, but I hope I have laid some groundwork for further discussion without getting too much off topic.
PentiumM was specially engineered for low power consumption - equivalent P4's use much more power and would kill the battery much quicker.
They are not apples to apples.
That was the impression I was getting. So how do you compare the processors of two computers when one has a P4 and the other an M?
added: So if you will be mostly using battery power it makes more sense to get an M, but if you will mostly be plugged into an outlet is there any disadvantage for getting an M?
Interesting you should ask. Intel is about to completely rename their product lines to take the clock speed out of the names. Product lines will be numbered based on overall performance.
But back to your question - If you need every bit of speed you can get and you run on AC power most of the time, I would go with the P4. But if battery life is even a little bit important, that would tip the scale to the M for me. The advantage of the M chip in battery life is much more significant than the advantage of the P4 in functional speed, based on reports I've read.
