I have just bought 2 computers; Acer with Centrino duo T2300 at 1,66Mgz
with 1G Ram and second Toshiba with Centrino T1300 at 1,86Mgz with 1G
Ram. Both are running Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. I run two
differents speed test on Eccel and the Centrino duo T2300 was more then
twice slower than the Centrino T1300. The clock speed difference
doesn't explain big difference. Im not sure if Excel is optimize to
run on a Centrino duo

Centrino is actually not a type of CPU - it refers to a "technology" that has
to do with wireless networking - consisting of 3 Intel made chipsets. One of
those is the CPU, the other two aren't. Actually, let's look at what you
have from a CPU standpoint alone:
Duo at 1.66 GHz (T2300)
Non-Duo at 1.86 GHz (T13))

In effect, on the Duo machine, Excel and most other applications today are
going to run on one of the two available cores. For the moment, think of Duo
as having 2 CPUs available. But each program can pretty much just use one at
the time. The advantage of having the dual-cores right now is being able to
split the load when running multiple applications between them. In its most
simplistic form: you run Excel and you run Word at the same time, picture
Excel as running on one core, Word running on the other.

Now, having tried to explain that very simply, what you have on the Duo
system is Excel running on a 1.66GHz speed CPU while on the single core
system it is running on a 1.86GHz CPU. So odds are it will run faster on the
T1300 vs the T2300.

Do not despair - time will come when the applications are built with the
ability to more fully utilize the features available in dual-core systems.
For the present, you should be able to run more on it with less slowdown than
running the same things on a single core system.

Within a family of processors, clock speed can be used as a good indicator
of relative performance expectations. But across differrent families, it can
fool you. Consider this: I have an Excel application that reads and
processes test data from 100 large .txt files created at a laboratory. Lots
of work to be done.
On an Intel P4 at 2.4GHz with 512MB it takes 80 minutes to finish.
on an AMD 3200+ at 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM it takes 60 minutes (same clock
speeds, but knocks 20 minutes off of the time.
Finally on my dual-core AMD X2 64 4800+ @ 2.4GHz w/1GB RAM it takes ONLY 20
minutes!
Three different families of CPU, all running at same clock speed, very
measurable differences in performance.
"jmb." wrote:

I have just bought 2 computers; Acer with Centrino duo T2300 at 1,66Mgz
with 1G Ram and second Toshiba with Centrino T1300 at 1,86Mgz with 1G
Ram. Both are running Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. I run two
differents speed test on Eccel and the Centrino duo T2300 was more then
twice slower than the Centrino T1300. The clock speed difference
doesn't explain big difference. Im not sure if Excel is optimize to
run on a Centrino duo

Thank for quick the answer.

I made a quick experience, i started two Excel application on the duo
and on each standalone application i run my speed test. Boths tests
were running independatly and with similar speed than only one. I will
may be use this solution in the future when i have two different huge
speadsheet to run at same time.

i would bring a curious point. i had oppen the grah on the task manager
and i saw that when i was runnig only one excel speed test, both cpu
were running!.

Do you know if new version of Office will use full power of the duo ?


JLatham a écrit :

Centrino is actually not a type of CPU - it refers to a "technology" that has
to do with wireless networking - consisting of 3 Intel made chipsets. One of
those is the CPU, the other two aren't. Actually, let's look at what you
have from a CPU standpoint alone:
Duo at 1.66 GHz (T2300)
Non-Duo at 1.86 GHz (T13))

In effect, on the Duo machine, Excel and most other applications today are
going to run on one of the two available cores. For the moment, think of Duo
as having 2 CPUs available. But each program can pretty much just use one at
the time. The advantage of having the dual-cores right now is being able to
split the load when running multiple applications between them. In its most
simplistic form: you run Excel and you run Word at the same time, picture
Excel as running on one core, Word running on the other.

Now, having tried to explain that very simply, what you have on the Duo
system is Excel running on a 1.66GHz speed CPU while on the single core
system it is running on a 1.86GHz CPU. So odds are it will run faster on the
T1300 vs the T2300.

Do not despair - time will come when the applications are built with the
ability to more fully utilize the features available in dual-core systems.
For the present, you should be able to run more on it with less slowdown than
running the same things on a single core system.

Within a family of processors, clock speed can be used as a good indicator
of relative performance expectations. But across differrent families, it can
fool you. Consider this: I have an Excel application that reads and
processes test data from 100 large .txt files created at a laboratory. Lots
of work to be done.
On an Intel P4 at 2.4GHz with 512MB it takes 80 minutes to finish.
on an AMD 3200+ at 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM it takes 60 minutes (same clock
speeds, but knocks 20 minutes off of the time.
Finally on my dual-core AMD X2 64 4800+ @ 2.4GHz w/1GB RAM it takes ONLY 20
minutes!
Three different families of CPU, all running at same clock speed, very
measurable differences in performance.
"jmb." wrote:

I have just bought 2 computers; Acer with Centrino duo T2300 at 1,66Mgz
with 1G Ram and second Toshiba with Centrino T1300 at 1,86Mgz with 1G
Ram. Both are running Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. I run two
differents speed test on Eccel and the Centrino duo T2300 was more then
twice slower than the Centrino T1300. The clock speed difference
doesn't explain big difference. Im not sure if Excel is optimize to
run on a Centrino duo

I don't know about support for dual core specifically built into Office 12.
It's actually tied more closely to the Operating System and Vista should be
more supportive.

My example above was very simplistic - I'm not surprised to see activity on
both cores in the Device Manager, I see the same thing here on the dual-core
systems I have here. I run a distributed computing application on all of my
machines, and on single core systems when I look at the performance graph I
will see 100% CPU usage while the system would otherwise be idle. On the
dual-core systems I see 50%, with distribution between the two cores is
sometimes 50,50, at other times, like right now, the distribution is 25/75.

With the demands being placed on systems today, dual-core is definitely the
way to go. On my dual-core systems (with the distributed app always running)
I never suffer slowdowns when system hogging things like full system
anti-virus scans, or drive defragging takes place. On my single-core systems
the distributed app has to completely shut itself down when I use the machine
in any way (very well behaved about that, by the way) but on the dual-core
machines, it just keeps plugging away which is great because the jobs done by
it can take anywhere from just a couple of hours to literally days - longer
on single-core systems because of the need to shut down to allow other apps
like Excel or Outlook or just web browsing to function.

"jmb." wrote:

Thank for quick the answer.

I made a quick experience, i started two Excel application on the duo
and on each standalone application i run my speed test. Boths tests
were running independatly and with similar speed than only one. I will
may be use this solution in the future when i have two different huge
speadsheet to run at same time.

i would bring a curious point. i had oppen the grah on the task manager
and i saw that when i was runnig only one excel speed test, both cpu
were running!.

Do you know if new version of Office will use full power of the duo ?


JLatham a écrit :

Centrino is actually not a type of CPU - it refers to a "technology" that has
to do with wireless networking - consisting of 3 Intel made chipsets. One of
those is the CPU, the other two aren't. Actually, let's look at what you
have from a CPU standpoint alone:
Duo at 1.66 GHz (T2300)
Non-Duo at 1.86 GHz (T13))

In effect, on the Duo machine, Excel and most other applications today are
going to run on one of the two available cores. For the moment, think of Duo
as having 2 CPUs available. But each program can pretty much just use one at
the time. The advantage of having the dual-cores right now is being able to
split the load when running multiple applications between them. In its most
simplistic form: you run Excel and you run Word at the same time, picture
Excel as running on one core, Word running on the other.

Now, having tried to explain that very simply, what you have on the Duo
system is Excel running on a 1.66GHz speed CPU while on the single core
system it is running on a 1.86GHz CPU. So odds are it will run faster on the
T1300 vs the T2300.

Do not despair - time will come when the applications are built with the
ability to more fully utilize the features available in dual-core systems.
For the present, you should be able to run more on it with less slowdown than
running the same things on a single core system.

Within a family of processors, clock speed can be used as a good indicator
of relative performance expectations. But across differrent families, it can
fool you. Consider this: I have an Excel application that reads and
processes test data from 100 large .txt files created at a laboratory. Lots
of work to be done.
On an Intel P4 at 2.4GHz with 512MB it takes 80 minutes to finish.
on an AMD 3200+ at 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM it takes 60 minutes (same clock
speeds, but knocks 20 minutes off of the time.
Finally on my dual-core AMD X2 64 4800+ @ 2.4GHz w/1GB RAM it takes ONLY 20
minutes!
Three different families of CPU, all running at same clock speed, very
measurable differences in performance.
"jmb." wrote:

I have just bought 2 computers; Acer with Centrino duo T2300 at 1,66Mgz
with 1G Ram and second Toshiba with Centrino T1300 at 1,86Mgz with 1G
Ram. Both are running Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. I run two
differents speed test on Eccel and the Centrino duo T2300 was more then
twice slower than the Centrino T1300. The clock speed difference
doesn't explain big difference. Im not sure if Excel is optimize to
run on a Centrino duo