First Intel Yonah Laptop Announced

Lam1969 writes "IDG News Service reports NEC will release its first laptop based on Intel's Yonah dual-core processor in the first quarter of 2006, for just under $2,000. According to AnandTech, Yonah performance is comparable to AMD Athlon 64 X2, and is more efficient than the AMD chip in terms of power consumption."

Comments

Re:More on that

[Wyatt Earp]

Uhhh. Powermacs don't use G4s anymore. Nor do the iMacs.

Both of those lines use the IBM 64bit G5 chip.

This is NOT a 64-bit CPU!

[Anonymous Coward]

So how does Yonah's performance compare to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 running AMD64/EM64T software? Yonah can't even run it. That doesn't sound faster to me.

Read about the benefits Intel ascribes to 64-bit software here. "Processors with Intel EM64T support 64-bit capable operating systems from Microsoft, Red Hat and SuSE." And you won't be able to run them.

There are some applications where a 64-bit CPU can perform FOUR TIMES more work in 64-bit mode than 32-bit mode. One of these is big integer multiplication. Check out Is 32 bits really better than 64?": "If we instead would compare an Athlon XP and an Athlon 64, the latter would be almost 4 times faster. Why 4 times and not just 2 times? Because a 64x64=>128 bit integer multiplication actually performs 4 times more work than a 32x32=>64 bit integer multiplication!"

If you want a low power 64-bit CPU consider an AMD Turion based notebook. Check out this article and its conclusions. In particular, "A lot of people see Dothan's 27W TDP & Turion ML's 35W TDP and assume that Dothan is automatically lower power. Intel computes thermal design power as 75% of the maximum load on the chip, while AMD's TDP rating is derived from the absolute worst case power dissipation of the chip. Part of the total system power is also incorporated into AMD's TDP, as the memory controller is located on-chip. Intel's memory controller is built into the chipset and thus draws power not calculated as part of Dothan's TDP. Also while Turion 64 is at idle (800MHz clock speed), it's performance is likely to be higher due to the higher bandwidth data bus. All of these factors contribute to Turion 64 being more power efficient under low load circumstances."

And the -MT Turions have even lower power consumption: AMD Turion 64 specifications.

My next notebook will not be constrainted to only running x86-32 software.

Re:XP Home?

[Rickler]

It's still one cpu (ie not a dual xeon). Although the article is unclear whether it will come with the dual core or single yonah.