[ Overview | Rationale | My Experience | Others' Experiences | Vendors | Benchmarks | Keyboard | Box | Booting | Q & A | The Future | Translations | Links ]

Benchmarking

If you scour the Web, you won't find much about the speed of the U101 other than that it has a "Celeron 600A" processor, not to be confused with a "Celeron 600 MHz" processor. After hunting around, I actually found a Japanese site where they had run SiSoftware's Sandra 2003 to compare the Sony U101, U3, and U1, both with and without AC power (plugged into the wall). You can see their benchmark here.

But since I have a copy of Sandra available, I figured I'd take the time to compare the U101's "Celeron 600A" against some better-known chips to find out how it stacks up. Here are the results:

First off, you'll notice that the U101's "Celeron 600A" outperforms a "Celeron 600" by several times, which makes sense, since the 600A is supposed to be built around the new Banias core, not the old Celeron core. In fact, you'll notice that the "Celeron 600A" performs almost exactly the same as a 750 MHz Pentium III. You can also see why Sony switched away from the Transmeta Crusoe: it just wasn't enough bang for the buck. In its non-AC mode (non-wall-power mode), the Crusoe performs less than half as well.

I've included a 1 GHz Pentium III for comparison simply because it's a very common chip. I included the 1.1 GHz Athlon because it's the computer I'm typing on right now.

In short, the U101 performs pretty well; it's not in the same category as the 2 GHz Pentium 4 laptops that they sell at CompUSA, but for 1.9 pounds, it packs plenty of punch.

Some folks have also wondered about the hard disk performance, since the little 1.8 inch Toshiba MK3004GAH is not exactly a well-known device. Here's the benchmark of the drive from Sandra (October 2003 release):

It's not as fast as some, and not as slow as others. Brand-new laptops and desktops will beat it pretty solidly these days, but it's right in line with a good-quality laptop hard drive from about a year or two ago. (It's only about 30% slower than my current desktop computer, which isn't bad at all.) I haven't found its speed to be a problem.