As an architecture student, I've worked on 3 diferent architecture firmas.
As an engineering student turned software engineer I've worked on Autocad myself and frequently work with hardware engineers who use Autocad. I can't imagine that the ideologies between an architecture workstation and an electrical or mechanical engineering workstation are all that different, but maybe they really are?
Those limitations have been overcome with the arrival of high res 15" and 16" tft screens, dedicated graphics sub-system and the PIII processors
Sorry, but no. Those limitations are defined by the intricacy and complexity of the project. I ran AutoCAD release 10 for DOS on a 486 with 32MB of RAM and it ran just peachy... for very low-complexity projects.
It's purely the complexity of the project itself that defines what kind of hardware you need to work on it. As technology allows projects to become more complex, they become more complex. It's just that simple.
Laptops, being underperformers compared to PCs, will always be insufficient for the types of projects typically done on 'workstations'. However, light projects (ones that don't even begin to push the capabilities of a workstation) will <i>always</i> be able to run on lesser machines. (Such as laptops and typical PC configurations.)
So what you're really saying is that your projects run just fine on a laptop and therefore just simply aren't very demanding. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. However <i>most</i> people that I know who do this kind of work need more power than a laptop could provide.
So we've comed to a situation were MOST of the architects I know do use portable computers, all of the time, even when they are not on the road. And I would risk to state this is an OBVIOUS rising trend.
Well MOST of the engineers (actually, ALL of them) that I know wouldn't touch a laptop for everyday use because it would be a massive productivity loss. The only time they EVER use a laptop is when demoing at conferences. (And even then they usually try to get a PC transported.) I hate to say it, but your 'OBVIOUS rising trend' isn't rising or obvious from my point of view. Again, maybe it just is a difference between an architect and a mechanical engineer.
That said, the presence of 3D-oriented architectural applications is rapidly increasing, but a mobilty Radeon 7500 or Geforce 4 Go will, again, do most of the jobs; and for the truly demanding projects we've got the new breed of Ati and Nvidia mobility processors right after the corner.
And they'll still be slower than anything that you can get on a PC <i>and</i> they don't have the professional workstation drivers. At the risk of sounding clique-esk, they're simply not something that most professionals would want to use.
So right now, the only major bottleneck left are the slow 2,5" hard drives spinning at 4200 and 5400 rpm. And even this is going to change with the arrival of the the first 7200 rpm hard drives coming from Hitachi (former IBM) in the next several months.
Actually, there are quite a many bottlenecks between a laptop and a 'workstation':
1) The laptop is limited to just one CPU.
2) The memory bandwidth hinders the one CPU that is in there.
3) Laptops just don't have as much RAM.
4) Mobile graphics systems lack professional drivers.
5) Mobile graphics systems just don't offer nearly the same performance.
6) Even the best LCD screen has 'fuzzy' pixels compared to a CRT.
7) Laptops don't have RAID arrays for project protection through data redundancy.
8) Laptops don't have 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SCSI drives.
So we've come to a point were the only major drawback is the weight and dimensions of those desktop replacement notebooks.
And let's not forget the performance. That's the biggest drawback of all for many people.
I know of at least 3 architects who would make the effort of investing a little bit more on buying a big screen laptop instead of a desktop if they were really portable, under the 3-4 kg mark.
And I know of five people (myself included) who would make the effort of investing into a 'laptop' if they could run a dual-CPU system with top-notch memory performance of at <i>least</i> 2GB of RAM, and a RAID array for their hard drive. Three of them would still be using a CRT monitor at their desk though.
But now that Banias is here, fully loaded notebooks with 15" screens and thin profiles are a reality, and so the choice to me is clear.
No offense, but if the choice to you was clear, then why post in the first place?
That is why I wish to know how much slower would one of those chips be in front of a P4-M 2,6 ghz. If the difference was big enought, I would turn my eyes again towards the bulkier systems (there is a nice Compaq for roughly 3 kg). But if we were talking about a 15-20% gain in front of a Centrino 1,6 ghz, I would clearly go for the Centrino.
If your biggest concern is just size and weight, then go Centrino. With those systems Intel is pushing for smaller and lower-voltage parts which means longer battery life and smaller/lighter laptops.
If your biggest concern is performance, the P4-M is still the best route. The P-M has a few nice tricks to use less electricity, but the P4-M has more actual power.
That is why I keep making my question: Has anybody tested the centrino with rendering tasks within 3dsmax?
And I'm saying that almost no one is (if not no one entirely) is going to bother running tests like 3DSM on laptops (especially Centrinos) because everyone looking for performance is going to have a workstation (or at least desktop replacement) in the first place. The only people who would even want to run AutoCAD on a laptop <i>aren't</i> going to be very concerned with performance. Why specifically benchmark for people who don't care and won't gain anything from the benchmark?
<font color=blue><pre>If you don't give me accurate and complete system specs
then I can't give you an accurate and complete answer.</pre><p></font color=blue>
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