Power-Thrifty Dual-Core: Enroute From Intel
My year-old Dell Inspiron 700m contains a second-generation 'Dothan' Pentium M processor but only a first-generation 855GME core logic chipset. I don't play 3D games on it, so the chipsets' generational jumps in integrated graphics features that Intel made (aside from, perhaps, additional hardware-assisted video decoding) are a don't-care to me, and I've long suspected that there'll be little-to-no performance boost (along with, perhaps, degraded power consumption) associated with the generation-to-generation PCI-to-PCI Express and DDR-to-DDR2 SDRAM transitions. A benchmarking study done on Intel's Sonoma platform (2nd generation 'Dothan' Pentium M CPU and 2nd generation 'Alviso' 915M core logic) by Laptop Logic (heads-up courtesy of AnandTech) a few months ago confirmed my hunch.
Now Yonah….that's a different matter. As you may recall from my earlier IDF coverage (Spring and Fall 2005), Yonah is the codename for Intel's first 65 nm low power-tuned dual-core CPU. Among other things, it's rumoured to be the CPU that Apple will employ in its first Intel-based laptops (and, perhaps, even Mac minis). The lucky folks at AnandTech have had an early Yonah sample for a month, but only recently were they able to obtain a motherboard (for a desktop PC, mind you, keep that in mind when you look at the power numbers) to plug it into. ARS Technica and Slashdot provide commentary on AnandTech's benchmarking of Yonah against both the Pentium M processor in my system and against AMD and Intel desktop PC CPUs. You might be a bit underwhelmed at the versus-AMD performance, even after you see the pick-up versus existing Intel CPUs…until you look at the relative power consumption numbers. Now scale down Yonah's power consumption even further, to what it'd be in a more optimized laptop PC hardware design. Impressive, huh?
I've just renewed the warranty on my Inspiron 700m for another two years; originally I planned on only a one-year extension but the incremental cost for another year was quite low (likely because statistically most folks replace their laptops every two years, so Dell incurs little cost to offset the incremental revenue of the 2nd year warranty extension….further buttressing the theory, a three-year extension was, in contrast, VERY expensive, likely reflecting the high costs required to service and maintain parts inventory for the trailing-edge diehards who resist upgrades). Will I hold on to this machine until December, 2007? Perhaps (especially if my fiscally frugal spouse has anything to say about it)….but I bet I'll be sorely tempted by some Yonah-powered gear along the way.
