I've always loved the Pentium M chip. It is a supercharged P3 core with bits of P4 sprinkled and retrofitted on top. Of course that is an overgeneralized overview, but considering the P4 was designed around RAMBUS and the P3 had trouble clocking above 1.2 Ghz, the Pentium M is quite a little wonderchip. People always wondered why I avoided the P4-M chips like the plague until they saw the battery life, performance and lack of burnt pants from the Centrino laptops.
Anyway, I've been following a very cool program that used to be called Centrino Hardware Control, but has branched out into more of an overall notebook performance package. My favorite feature overall is the ability to tune the voltages of the Pentium M chip based on what multiplier you have set.
Most people wouldn't care about this, but considering that I can tune down my 2Ghz Pentium M from 1.34V to 0.9V and have a rock solid machine is a great example of the yield Intel has developed with these chips. I know this isn't typical results overall, since this seems to be a special chip overall, but it definitely extends battery life nicely.
The program is also a good example of a .NET 2.0 application that doesn't work and feel like a "clunky" .NET program. I highly recommend it.
You can grab it from
here.
One strange thing I have noticed is that if the CPU is running at 1.93 Ghz, it will interfere with CDMA data transfers and cell phone reception. At first I thought it was a fluke, but everytime the laptop is running at 'full blast' at or around 1.9 or 2.0 Ghz, which is near/within the PCM freq. range, cell phone data transfers will start dropping packets.
The HP laptop seems to have enough shielding on it, so it is a bit puzzling but it happens every time.
I'm still tweaking the 20x multiplier voltage settings. It seems a bit crashy around 1.1 volts and is very stable at 1.2 volts. I suspect there is a sweet spot somewhere in between. I'm just impressed that some of the nearby multipliers can go so low, voltagewise, without any problems.