Intel Mobile Penryn Benchmarked: Battery Life Improves Again
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 7, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Another day, another dollar, another year, another Centrino. This processor-only update to Santa Rosa actually interests us more than what we saw last year with the introduction of the Santa Rosa platform.
This year's Centrino update is much more back to the basics: performance goes up, as does battery life, and Intel does it all at no additional cost to the end user.
Possibly because it was a ultra-high-end only launch, but Penryn on the desktop just didn't seem nearly as exciting as mobile Penryn. Here the benefits are even more tangible; by keeping clock speeds the same and using the improvements of Intel's 45nm transistors to lower the voltage, Intel is able to reduce power consumption to a measurable degree in a notebook using mobile Penryn.
Current Santa Rosa owners don't really have any burning need to go out and upgrade their systems, but if you were thinking about buying a new laptop you might as well hold off for another month so that these Penryn based systems can hit the streets.
If you have an aging Centrino notebook, now would be a good time to upgrade. We suspect that the timing of Intel's mobile Penryn announcement may have something to do with the fact that Apple will be holding its MacWorld conference next week.
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metacircular - Friday, January 11, 2008 - link
Thanks for the review, but could the reviewers comment on the temperature differences between the two processors? I'm assuming lower voltage will result in less heat, but it would be nice to see some numbers.legoman666 - Thursday, January 10, 2008 - link
It's a shame about that DAT not really being useful. It seems like their ideas were hampered by the fact that applications always bounce from 1 core to another. Looks/sounds like a good idea though.Jussi - Wednesday, January 9, 2008 - link
Thanks for an interesting article, Penryn it seems like a nice, although not essential refresh.I'd like to nitpick the SSE4 performance numbers. You state that in case of Virtualdub "Penryn would offer a greater than 40% increase in performance". I find this to be incorrect.
Let performance or speed (v) be defined as v = work unit / time. v1 is the speed of Merom and v2 is the speed of Penryn. Comparing Penryn to Merom = v2/v1 => t1/t2. Using your numbers 47.3s / 28.2s = 1.677 => 68% better performance.
It would be correct to state that using Penryn takes about 40% less time to do the job, but that is not what the article states.
puffpio - Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - link
Could I just swap chips out?channelv - Wednesday, January 9, 2008 - link
Yup, the D630 uses the 965 chipset (Santa Rosa). But you'd better wait for a BIOS update from Dell first before you think about putting a Penryn in there - I'd expect those to roll out almost any day now, but by Feb. for sure.Mr Alpha - Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - link
Have I understood it correctly, that you are comparing the SSE4 version of DivX on Penryn with the same SSE4 version of DivX on Merom? Shouldn't you be comparing the SSE4 version of DivX on Penryn to the SSE3 version of DivX on Merom?mi1400 - Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - link
Electric surges drain battery faster. When a device bulb, motor etc starts a peak is occured in load and then load comes to a lesser and steady value. Intel Dynamic Acceleration may result in same for battery.Mgz - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
how about the Deep Power Down (C6) stage that penryn brings ? Any test on this feature?coolme - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
Good review, but just to note.Merom (part of santa rosa) supports Intel Dynamic Acceleration, (although T7xxx series only) and since you guys weren't aware of that, the cinebench benchmark (and other benchmarks) with the T7800 might have a skewed score.
duploxxx - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
Nice to see that the t9xxx series will step up the performance again and battery life. Altough we can already say that Intel dominated this part of the mobile market for a long time with t7xxx it is now sure that it will increase that even more.what i really want to no is what about low end and midstream, how good are these t2xxx - t5xxx - t7xxx series compared to each other and what happens when you put a rather cheap turion class next to those t2 and t5 series.
@anand i think you would hit a readers max out of such a review, but then again it would take a lot of time and effort to get a nice compare with equal hardware parts and price....