Intel Core i7 For Laptops — First Benchmarks

Barence writes "PC Pro has benchmarked the first Intel Core i7 processors for laptops. The chips mark the debut of Intel's Turbo Boost technology, which ramps up the speed of the working cores if two or more cores are sitting unused. For the quad-core i7-820QM, this can take the stock speed of 1.73GHz up to a maximum of 3.06GHz. The 2D benchmarks show comparable performance to Core 2 Extreme chips running at 2.53GHz. Power consumption and processor temperature is dramatically lower, which should lead to significant improvements in laptop battery life."

Comments

Turbo Boost technology?

[leathered]

Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[Jurily]

They used up all their creativity coming up with "i7-820QM".

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[nurb432]

Hey, the 80's clothing styles are coming back. Why not the phrases too?

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[dingen]

Probably the same people who came up with USB 3's "SuperSpeed mode".

Apparently marketing is now in the hands of 11-year old boys.

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[Kjella]

I'm just waiting for them to tag an Ultra Extreme on top of that.

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[linhares]

im not buying till the ultimate edition launches

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[dserpell]

Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?

Sadly, this technology was called "Intel Dynamic Acceleration" (IDA) in Core-2 CPU's, but nobody noticed it. So, Intel tried with "Dual Dynamic Acceleration" (DDA), but again, nobody noticed. At last, renamed it to "Turbo Boost" and now everybody thinks it's something new.

So, after three attempts, it seems that the current name is the best.

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[Mad Merlin]

Maybe because (from what I can tell), IDA and DDA only boosted one core by ~200 MHz or less, TFS suggests that Turbo Boost can take one core of a 1.73 GHz chip to 3.06 GHz, which is substantially better. Maybe that's why people are noticing now?

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[Tumbleweed]

Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?

No problemo!

Turbo Boost+
Turbo Boost xTreme!
iTurbo Boost
Turbo Boost ][+ (or //e)
Turb0 B005t - L33t 3d1t10n
Turbo Boost 3000
Turbo Boost 3000++ Gold Pro Enterprise Edition...For Kids

Intel Marketing Deparment: We Look for Things. Things to Make Us Go.

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[click2005]

It reminds me of the old PCs with a turbo button on the front.

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[jawtheshark]

With Later models of PC tower units, there would have a couple of LED digits that displayed the clock speed (20/25/33/40/50/60 Mhz).

Actually, they didn't really "display" the speed. They displayed whatever the little jumpers on their back told them to display. Yeah, they were jumper controlled displays. You could set them to anything you wanted. I remember "reprogramming" one into displaying "Hi" and "Lo".

Re:Turbo Boost technology?

[kimvette]

FWIW, Turbochargers ARE superchargers; they are just turbine-driven. Turbine-driven superchargers are far more efficient than gear or belt-driven superchargers; they use waste energy to compress the air and aside from variable-vane/variable nozzle turbines, turbochargers' efficiency are usually confinued to a narrow exhaust CFM (in essence, RPM) range.

The reason "superchargers" (referring to mechanically-driven) are preferred for some applications is that they are directly coupled to the engine's speed, so there is no lag time. If a turbocharger were used in say, top fuel racing, the size requirements and the turbo lag would make turbochargers woefully impractical. With mechanically-driven superchargers the crew chief and engineers will know EXACTLY when boost will come on despite atmospheric pressure, temperature, and so forth, and there is near-zero lag. Also, the torque curve can be much broader/less peaky than a turbocharger.

They (mechanically-driven superchargers) are grossly inefficient because some superchargers used in, say, top fuel, require over 700hp just to turn them, but at the scale that those engines operate (over 6500hp now) 700hp isn't much of a concern. On the street is is a higher concern, such that some cars which have had superchargers over the years were actually clutched (such as the Mk1 MR2) so they weren't creating parasitic drag during normal driving conditions.

Turbochargers do not have much parasitic drag under normal driving conditions so they are more practical for the street since CAFE and emissions regulations are a concern. Also, there are some street-legal C4 and C5 Corvettes with 800-1200hp; what kind of supercharging do the highest-output tuner cars have? Turbochargers, be the cars from Lingenfelter, Hennessey, or some others. There are some other create tuners that do only mechanically-driven superchargers and the torque curve may come on much earlier, but on average their advertised peak power output is much lower.

Goobers still saying Core This and Core That

[Informative]

They must have the most shameless shit-for-brains in their marketing dept.

Re:Goobers still saying Core This and Core That

[uassholes]

It was an attempt to distract from the superiority of the AMD chips at that time, especially the Opteron.
What can you do when you are trying to keep X86 to 32 bits so only your Itanium is the sole 64 bit chip, when along comes AMD and creates a 64 bit x86 chip. You have no choice but to use AMD's 64 bit instruction set in your new 64 bit Pentium, AKA Xeon.
Oh, oh; AMD created a memory controller far more efficient than yours, OK copy that too.
Now Intel had caught up.

Re:Goobers still saying Core This and Core That

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel started using the Pentium brand back in 1993, and they're still selling chips under that name even today.
Core is probably their most recognized brand since then, so I expect it to be with us for quite some time to come.

Re:Goobers still saying Core This and Core That

[Kjella]

It was an attempt to distract from the superiority of the AMD chips at that time, especially the Opteron.

Why would they try to distract from anything, once they had the Core processors? They were the comeback of Intel after the poor performance of the Pentium IV. I'm guessing it was more "let's ditch a brand that's gotten tarred and make a splash with a new brand" like how Vista is replaced with Windows 7.

battery life?

[iamhassi]

"Power consumption and processor temperature is dramatically lower, which should lead to significant improvements in laptop battery life."

compared to? Because from the graphs the core2duo had much better battery life, and core2duo battery life sucks imho. Wish they'd focus more on improving the battery life of two cores because 4 cores in a laptop is overkill 99% of the time, I'd rather have a extra hour of battery life and suffice with two cores.

Re:battery life?

[Korin43]

Did you not even read the summary? That seems to be the entire point. They make two cores run at full speed, and the other two go into low-power more. So two cores, lower battery life.

Re:battery life?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You say that like battery life at the extreme expense of performance, or performance at the extreme expense of battery life are the only two choices at hand.

I'm sure netbooks fit an important need, the same goes for the desktop replacements, but it would be nice if some battery life attention was paid in between the extremes.

Re:battery life?

[Animaether]

No, what I am saying is you can't have both without making some manner of compromise at the moment.

There's currently no real incentive for Intel to make more energy-efficient Core 2 Duos because the market -is- very segmented between those who are perfectly fine with the Core 2 Duos as they are (fairly powerful and reasonable battery life, though not fo true mobility), and those who really need longer battery life and are on the go a lot, who are fine with a netbook using a Core 2 Solo or Atom (or any of the AMD equivalents) processor.

Of course it -is- possible to get something in between, but you have to accept (unless you have millions to pursuade Intel otherwise ahead of any schedule they might have to introduce a more efficient platforms after all) that it is a fairly niche market.

Companies do cater to that niche market, however; Lenovo, for example. The Lenovo T400 runs a nice Core 2 Duo. Its battery life is a bit above that of the average notebook - but you -can- even extend that by upgrading from a 4-cell (~4 hours) to a 6-cell or even a 9-cell battery (~10 hours) and go beyond that if you add the external bay battery.
Take the figures with a pinch of the usual 'battery life claims' salt and you should still be very comfortable with the 9-cell w/o bay battery.

No, adding batteries doesn't make the platform more efficient, but it -is- the next best thing available right now, especially if the desire is for 'longer battery life' and not necessarily a more efficient platform.

Re:battery life?

[Colonel Korn]

Yep... the Turbo Boost is a great idea for desktops, it always gives you the maximum performance within a given thermal envelope. But to laptops, it's pretty much the anti-steedstep, making it spend as much power as possible when it's almost idle. However, it seems they didn't test the real minimum by disabling turbo. I'm assuming the laptops can control this from software, anything else would be silly. Sure, it'll also drop your performance from 3.06 to 1.73GHz but since power is roughly proportional with frequency squared it should also lower the CPU to about (1.73 / 3.06)^2 = 32% power consumption.

It's a good point that this seems to counter speedstep, but to some extent they work together. A 3.06 GHz frequency allows a particular computing task to be finished faster so the chip can fall back to the idle speedstep frequency (on my ~3 GHz desktop i-7 the idle speed is 1.2 GHz). Also, come to think of it, you mixed up the exponent in the CPU power equation. The power draw is proportional to frequency and to the square of voltage, not the other way around. So assuming CPU task completion time scales to the -1 power with frequency, which seems reasonable, the increased power draw for the higher frequency exactly cancels with the fact that processes will finish faster.

Who needs that?

[wasabioss]

Although faster is better and will be every Slashdotter's wet dream, but I'd rather have power-efficient laptops rather than a gazillion Ghz laptop. I don't get why an average Joe needs a Core 2 Duo laptop for Word processing and surfing the web, which is what most people have and what most people do now. And now they're going to put i7 on the laptops. There will be some people who needs it, but not the majority of casual laptop users, who don't do video encoding or kernel compilation (which should be the work of a desktop IMHO).

I have two atom powered laptops and I even sold my laptops because I was so in love with those machines, which wouldn't burn my lap and my balls whenever I have to sit them on my laps. Other than the pitiful 950 graphics, I have nothing to complain about.

And I heard they fixed it with the Z5x0 chipset - on Windows at least, but as I don't have one, I can't verify it.

Re:Who needs that?

[xigxag]

Lots of people use their laptop as their only machine. In that case it's helpful to have a device that can sip power when away from the mains but whilst plugged in can run with the big dogs.

Re:Who needs that?

[olsmeister]

wouldn't burn my lap and my balls whenever I have to sit them on my laps.

LAPS? I've heard of multiple chins, but LAPS?

Re:Who needs that?

[jeffstar]

I don't get why an average Joe needs a Core 2 Duo laptop for Word processing and surfing the web

Joe's flashtube can peg a core at 100% but he can use the other one to kill it?

Re:Who needs that?

[Cornelius the Great]

Laptops have generally kept up with their desktop in terms of speed- as long as you're willing to pay. There are already quad-core laptops with dual GPUs (SLI or Crossfire) that would mop the floor with the majority of desktops. The only problem is, battery life is crap, and they're too hot to actually use on your lap (while gaming at least). Oh, and they cost 2-3 times as much as an equivalent desktop.

Re:Who needs that?

[bertok]

Add an SSD and a good I7 laptop will certainly blow the socks of most desktops out there. Laptops are now just a few MHz and disk spins away from desktops really. Add an SSD and this kind of processor and the gap is as good as gone. I'm already planning on using my PC just for development, my other tasks just don't need (cheap) 8GB of memory and a stack of hard drives.

That makes zero sense... if a laptop with an SSD is good, then an SSD in a good i7 workstation will be even better, for 1/2 the price. In practice, laptops will always be behind desktops, because of the compromises they have to make for weight, size, cooling, and power consumption. They're not catching up to a stationary target.

For example, I have a laptop with 8GB of memory, a high-end SSD, and a dual-core CPU. It rocks. It's so fast, it gives me tunnel vision. However, the RAM was expensive, 8GB is the upper limit, and the CPU is anemic compared to what I'd like to have in it.

Meanwhile, my friends and coworkers are getting 3GHz quad-core desktops with 12GB of memory, an SSD, terabytes of disk, etc... Those machines are beasts. If you do real work, like running multiple virtual machines, databases, and heavy-weight development environments, they're a real time saver. Unfortunately, I'm a consultant, so I need my work machine to be portable. 8(

The real difference is that my laptop cost me about AUD 6000 all up, but you can have almost 2x that performance for AUD 3000 if you buy a workstation instead. I don't know what the US price is like, but here in Australia, you can have 12 GB of DDR3 memory for AUD 400. That's just... wrong. In the same price range as my laptop, you can get a dual-socket (8 core) workstation with 24GB of memory, an SSD, and 8TB of spinning disk. In 6 months, when octo-core CPUs are available, up that to 16 cores! A laptop with an even remotely similar spec won't be available for at least a year and a half.

Re:Who needs that?

[maxume]

My computer is 85% toy, so I can't really justify a big budget to myself, but still, I'm sitting here wondering what someone from 2003 would say reading your comment.

Re:Who needs that?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Although faster is better and will be every Slashdotter's wet dream, but I'd rather have power-efficient laptops rather than a gazillion Ghz laptop.

That's you. You're at peace with the world, and feel compelled to announce it.

. I don't get why an average Joe needs a Core 2 Duo laptop for Word processing and surfing the web, which is what most people have and what most people do now. And now they're going to put i7 on the laptops.

Ah, Joe Average is a man of limited aspirations. Web and Word. Web and Word. All day long. Joe Average doesn't need to game, But then, Joe Average runs Linux. There are no games for Linux.

And now they're going to put i7 on the laptops. There will be some people who needs it, but not the majority of casual laptop users, who don't do video encoding or kernel compilation (which should be the work of a desktop IMHO).

Video encoding-- everybody wants to encode video. Why? Maybe that's why they keep the old word processor around, to draft letters to attorneys. Now kernel compilation-- that's real work there-- though someone who was hacking the kernel instead of recompiling the latest point release would probably appreciate a lightweight, portable machine for coding. Does emacs count as a "word processor"?

I have two atom powered laptops and I even sold my laptops because I was so in love with those machines, which wouldn't burn my lap and my balls whenever I have to sit them on my laps. Other than the pitiful 950 graphics, I have nothing to complain about.

Quite. Because any games that would put a dent in Core 2 Duo wouldn't run very well on a gma 950.

I know, I know. We're in the middle of a depression, and one's aspirations must be humble. But in buying a laptop, which can't be expanded very easily, it's often wise to plan for future needs.

Re:Who needs that?

[Tubal-Cain]

I'm sitting here wondering what someone from 2003 would say...

Probably something along the lines of:
"Duke Nukem still isn't out?!?!"

Re:Who needs that?

[Jeremy Erwin]

When buying a computer, it's never very wise to pick a model that merely meets your expectations, or undercuts them. A computer that's only suitable "for surfing the web"and "word processing" may just happen to choke on web video.

Even if you aren't a hardcore gamer, there's always a chance that some company might release a compelling title-- that doesn't even run on your new barebones laptop,

Ok, so you run linux. Ever thought of tweaking the code? A faster laptop might reduce build times to the point where coding is pleasurable-- from hours to minutes.

But you've looked at this from a architecture cynic's point of view-- there's no way that programmers will learn parallel processing, rendering a 4 core machine (like the i7) useless. That too might pass.

It's a joke that dual core is useful for flash because one cpu can choke, and the other can make the system responsive enough to shut down the offending video. But a second or third core can be used by the OS to house clean, make backups, index files, scan for viruses, In addition, various languages and tools are emerging that make concurrent, multithreaded programming easier than before. SInce single threaded performance is not the sole focus of future CPU design anymore, programmers will have no choice but to program for multiple cores.

Today, not six months from now, but today, Google Chrome generates multiple processes, one for each window. Might it be faster on a Core i7? Next year, to surf the web in style, you just might "need" a Core i9 with 24 GB RAM.

I hope that answers your questions.

Re:Who needs that?

[TheRaven64]

I think you are failing to take into account economies of scale. For a long time, laptop components were more expensive than desktop equivalents because they had tighter constraints and because desktop components had much higher volumes. Last year, laptop sales passed desktop sales. This means that the highest-volume parts are now made for laptops, not for desktops. If this trend continues, then expect to see a premium on desktop parts to make up for the low volumes in the next few years. You could still build a desktop out of laptop parts, of course, but if all of the components are designed for laptops you won't be able to squeeze much extra power out of them by putting them in a bigger case.

macbook pro?

[MrBallistic]

coming to a macbook pro near you in january, i'd guess....

Idle power consumption

[owlstead]

I really like it when chips have small idle power usage, and this chip seems to run pretty cool when it is not taxed. Intel always had the lead in manufacturing capability, and it seems that this is one of the nice results.

I'm really waiting for the day when you (can) just leave your computer on at all times. Most of the times the chips are doing nothing anyway, so why should it use any power? Where is the technology to switch off memory banks when they are not used? Just page the stuff to my SSD (yes, I'm talking about the future here). Why don't processors have a small power efficient core for running the OS and applications at idle? Gigabit ethernet is getting power saving functions as well, and Wifi N has power saving features as well. Having the computer almost idling without having the fan of my PSU or processor switch on should be a killer feature.

One thing missing seems to be software support. I don't like it when my laptop drains much power just because one core is using 100% power because of a friggin flash ad on one of the tabs in my browser. We need more ways of restricting processes to use as many resources. What use is a computer that runs on almost no power when idle when it is never idling? And we'll need OS support for cores with different feature sets as well.

Re:Idle power consumption

[Trebawa]

What we need is a better Flash plugin. Really, Adobe, you can't do better for your own software?

Re:Idle power consumption

[Kjella]

Intel always had the lead in manufacturing capability, and it seems that this is one of the nice results.

This time it's little to do with their manufacturing capability in terms of process size, it's R&D specifically to achieve this. They basicly created a new "shut-off" form of transistor that effectively blocks off everything behind it. You can read more about it here.

Now give me the dual core...

[mejogid]

The article doesn't seem to suggest that this will really be enough to bring quad core laptops out of their current niche - we're talking an expensive machine which will clock in a bit over 3 hours battery life if you don't use its power, and potentially under an hour if you do. This would presumably be even worse with the higher clocked chip mentioned. I just don't feel there's much demand for such portable workstations - I can't see a good case for doing anything that processor intensive on the go. What does look very interesting is the 32nm dual core version - if they can carry over a comparable power consumption improvement to what they've achieved at the quad-core level that could be a very fast, very power efficient machine.

Battery life

[N!NJA]

From TFS:

Power consumption and processor temperature is dramatically lower, which should lead to significant improvements in laptop battery life.

worry not. Microsoft and Adobe will find a way to offset that....

Re:Battery life

[bunratty]

It's the ad author, who used a loop for polling or delaying until the next frame instead of a wait or sleep, who's to blame. Anyway, just run Firefox with Adblock Plus and you'll see hardly any of those ads.

We have low end, now the high end...

[tetsukaze]

Where is the middle? Atom based equipment is changing how we define portable computers and is very exciting. These new chips are going to bring amazing power in a portable format. The problem for the average user is that these are two extremes that currently don't help them. The middle of the road laptop that can be used for everyday use has not had any major innovations or significant price drops for some time. I understand diversifying is important, but where is the new tech for that more middle of the road work load?

Re:We have low end, now the high end...

[owlstead]

You mean those devices with LED screens or multi-touch touchpads or SSD drives or smaller units without optical drive or devices with much longer battery life or Bluetooth/Wireless N or 500 GB laptop drives? Those with eSATA and HDMI connectors and high end cameras and microphone arrays? The ones with usable fingerprint reader devices?

Yes, I agree, no innovations to be found for those devices.

Why not?

[ciroknight]

"Dynamic Load-based Overclocking" just doesn't sound as good as "Ultra Speedburner" or "Turbo Boosters" on the tin.

Re:Cool

[joaommp]

it is a hot product, however...

Where are the asymetric multiprocessors?

[MMC Monster]

How about pairing one of these with an Intel Atom? The atom turns on cores within the Core I7 when it is pegged, and turns them off (potentially turning off the entire chip) when things quiet down.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Running single-core

[jones_supa]

Excluding some special cases, I presume you would still get the best real-life performance by just running one core all times at that 3.06GHz speed.