Hi Miller,
Thanks for the tips.
HOWEVER, I sure doubt any laptop will have the memory and I/O bandwidth to support high frame-rate pix operations on 1024x768 anyway. Also, the more expensice CPU is likely to burn more watts, so your battery life goes down and your machine may crash occasionally or even catch on fire.
I have not seen the issue of over loaded laptops burning among the Pd docs. Or is it not unique to Pd? :)
The (desktop) machine I'm using now has 2M, and the one I travel with has 512K. My personal rule is to stay in the $100-$150 CPU price range which seems to be a sort of sweet spot for desktop machines. It's probably possible to find a similar point-of-diminishing-returns for mobile CPUs; just hit pricewatch.com and look for the point above which the prices start soaring much faster than FSB and CPU clock rates.
O/T, Incidentally, till recently trends said that over clocking a Q6600 was the way to go in terms of cost performance. Although this was for desktops and not laptops which I am looking into, as far as I know, for the first time in DAW (and other music app) history, there had been less stress in choosing hardware. I wish it were always that easy.
Thank you for the tip, I think I will go for the T8x00 and buy you a beer with the few hundred dollars saved.
-- David Shimamoto