What's the deal on Dothans?

[Meghan]

I've been reading about the Penitum-M chip called Dothan. If I understand correctly - and I might not - it's a super-efficient reworking of a Celeron chip. So it's older but it's also high-tuned and refined.

If I understand correctly, it offers near Pentium 4 perfomance with vastly reduced power consumption and heat output.

Here's a site that argues the case for Dothans but I was wondering if anyone here had any thoughts.

Thanks!

[Peacedog]

This isn't my area of expertise, but part of this could be because that high end pentium chip is overrated. I had a teacher last week who was bad mouthing level 3 cache (which it has). He said it didn't offer much in the way of a performance boost (we never discussed it explicitly, but the impression I got was because it was faster in circumstances where what the CPU wanted was in the level 3 cache but *not* RAM - note that there's no performance gain having something in the L3 cache as opposed to L1 or 2; slower when what it wanted was in RAM and not one of the caches). Also, he said chips with it generated significantly more heat (I might be remembering that wrong).

So the Dothan generating less heat might be partly attributable to it not having a level 3 cache. In other words, it isn't a benefit on dothan's part per se. After Intel's celeron fiasco of many moons ago, I wouldn't blame people for avoiding any sort of "budget" chip by intel, though Dothan doesn't appear to have any obvious issues (Celerons initially lauched sans level 2 cache I believe it was, and that caused them to perform like crap compared to their pentium counterparts. Eventually, l2 cache models were released. The Celeron 300A had l2 cache and was an overclocker's dream, as I recall).

If I was going to build a machine today, and I wanted to save some extra money, I'd probably just do it by building an AMD based system, and that's how I'd save money on the chip. I went Intel with this machine 3 years ago, but I considered AMD for some time before making that decision. That said, I don't know much about Dothan, except at first glance it doesn't appear to have any Celeron-like problems.

[The Meal]

My understanding is that the Dothan chipset is an amped (i.e., more efficient) Pentium III based setup. I'm madly in love with my Dothan-powered laptop, but the most processor-intensive thing I do with it is Morrowind, not numerical integrations (thank goodness *those* days are behind me).

~Neal

[Meghan]

Thanks guys. I should say I guess that I'm looking at this for powering a laptop. My goal here is to buy a laptop for immediate use and then next spring, nag PD into helping me build a new desktop. (And my family can use my current desktop while they dither about.)

That being the plan, I'm not looking to buy a desktop replacement per se. I'd looking to save the pounds that pentiums add to laptops. It's good to hear that your Dothan will play Morrowind Meal since that's the baseline of acceptability in this game room.

cheers~

[Peacedog]

I've done a little more reading (still looking) and it does seem to be a pretty good chip. I'm not sure what to make of its peformance benchmarks in that article on an older chipset. Some of that is probably irrelevant. Some of it (the graphics related stuff) is something you'd probably want in the desktop building situation (where you want the system to be as expandable as possible off the chosen mobo). Since it's going into a laptop, it probably doesn't matter much at all.

My guess is this is probably going to be a good way to shave cost/LBs/heat (The article noted the Dothan was generating 1/4th of the heat, which is nice).