I saw this. This looks like one more reason to choose 32 bit. According to what I read across the Internet about processors for notebooks, the Pentium M (centrino technology) looks very good for realtime audio. The AMD equivalent (Sempron) should be good too, but I didn't find much information about it; maybe someone here has a laptop with this type of cpu ?
I have a centrino and in comparison to desktop p4's it's much faster at the same clockspeed. It's said that a 1.7GHz Pentium M (dothan) is faster than a 3.0GHz P4. http://www.tecchannel.de/imgserver/bdb/341800/341851/C2E2D1F2D6C75DD830F7D60...
i've never noticed any denormal problems. and denormals are not a problem when using sse2 anyway. so if you have denormal probs you should try to force the compiler to use sse2 instructions. closed source software which has denormal probs is just badly coded or improperly compiled. (sorry, i'm not sure, if what i've wrote is perfectly true - but polemic is fun) the only processors which are a little faster than the PM2.0Ghz are the P4 3.8Gz and the the Athlon 4000+. This small advantage of additional speed is outweighted by the fact that these cpu are electricity-hungry 100watts monsters. semprons suck as much as celerons. The advantages of the Pentium M's relating wattage and thus battery running time and noise are huge. it's so pleasant working on a silent computer, ahhhh... i love it. everytime i have to work on a normal-loud desktop/laptop i'm wondering how i could stand that noise over the years.
sven.