What makes Centrino so fast?

[Narvi]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Rob wrote:

> I have my own benchmark program that I use for number crunching.
> It uses a mixture of Python and Numeric Python.
>
> Athlon 2166Mhz as reported by OS:  2m38.7s
> Intel Centrino Pentium 1700 Mhz:   2m17s
>

it has 1mb 1.7ghz l2 cache? it also probably has a tweaked version of the
P3 core (with sse2 added) instead of P4 core. but intel doesn't talk much
about how the centrino core is different (in non-marketing terms) from p6
(used in ppro/pii/piii) or pentium4 core.

> Is it just compiler optimization at play?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Rob
>