Outside of increasing clock speed and adding 1mb cache (they will have 2mb total, right?), I'm not sure. If you can wait, and you have the money for the newest technologies, I would.

I dunno. With that attitude you can keep waiting...

As dothan will be released at 1.9 Ghz and a month later with 2.1 Ghz and one month later even higher... PC business hapens to follow the moto "What you buy now is outdated within the month" .

Speed difference is not that big compared to centrino1. The larger cache will be better for office use though (but does that need to get any faster) and the energy/performance ratio would also be a little better.

As a 1.7 Ghz centrino can compete with a 2.8 Ghz P4. I think it has plenty of power to spare to last at least 3 years. The only really power hunger applications are games and those have more benefit from a modern GPU (which is released every 2 months as well).

 

 

bigger cache always means a performance increase.

woot! <3 the bigger cache

Cache is certainly beneficial, but far not in all applications and sadly enough not for games.

That's why the celerons with their small cache where such excelent gaming processors. They where however significantly slower in office tasks. Also the 1 to 2 mb cache upgrade will be something like a 512 mb to 1024 mb memory upgrade. It sure gives some improvement but far not as impressive as the step from 512K to 1M was.

I'm afraid the dothan release will have to wait a few more months due to marketing strategy of intel. As a 1.7 Ghz P-M can compete with a 2.8 Ghz P4 the 1.9 dothan with its improvements would be very close to the P4-3.2 Ghz flagship. The 2.1 Ghz would but it completely to shame. Why buy a laptop with that hot & power hungry CPU if you can have a much cooler and energy saving but equally fast dothan? There are words though that intel will stop its line a mobile P4s. Then the desktop P4 will slowely move to lower budget laptops. But with the centrino celeron on the way they will be replaced quickly even there.