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Intel's New Chips, High Power And Low
sebFlyte writes "Centrino has been one of Intel's major successes of late, and they've just released the replacement, Sonoma. ZDNet has stripped the new chipset, and published a review of the new kit with all the technical details of what this new chipset will do for your laptop."
ZeroOne42 adds a link to Hardware Zone's exhaustive look at Sonoma, "complete with benchmark results between a Sonoma notebook (Fujitsu E8020) and a Centrino one (Gigabyte N512). Looks like Sonoma is closing up the technological gap between desktops and notebooks."
And on the desktop side, foxalopex writes "It seems that Intel's new dual-core CPU chips will have some of the highest wattage ratings ever seen on the X86 CPU market, which, according to Tom, wasn't what they initially said would happen. I guess this isn't too surprising seeing how AMD's been beating them on power usage in the last several revisions of chips."
Only recently did I become aware that there was a marked architectural difference between 500 and 700 series CPUs - and I read about distinctions between Pentium mobile and Pentium M chips. While I applaud the move away from correlating the computing capability of a chip with its clock speed, I now find myself (as I suspect the typical man in the street also find themselves) completely unable to compare the relative performances between the various CPU series.
I realise that benchmarking is no panacea - but it would be really helpful to see a comprehensive set of benchmarks in order that I can establish a rough idea of the advantages of upgrading before splashing out on a machine with a newer processor. When Mhz mattered a good rule of thumb was that it was only worth considering an upgrade when the new CPU had a clock at least twice as fast as the old one... How should a user make this sort of decision with the new names? Is there any 'good' (unbiased) online material?
Answer: 100%
From an energy perspective, the CPU only converts electricity into heat; it's not like a light bulb that converts x% of the power into light and y% into heat. Energy can't turn into processed instructions.
Now, if you want to know how power efficient is a processor, you'd have to obtain the MIPS-Watts or FLOPS-Watts ratio, and compare these numbers between CPUs.