Intel Core i7 For Laptops — First Benchmarks 196
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."
Idle power consumption (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Now give me the dual core... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Goobers still saying Core This and Core That (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
We have low end, now the high end... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who needs that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Turbo Boost technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Where are the asymetric multiprocessors? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Turbo Boost technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
It reminds me of the old PCs with a turbo button on the front.
Adobe Flash stops Vista from going into sleep mode (Score:1, Interesting)
Flash is even worse for power consumption than you think. On Vista if you have Flash loaded in your browser (maybe you watched youtube or an advertisement or something), it prevents Vista from going to into sleep mode per your power settings. Even if the video is over (e.g. youtube is showing the "replay?" button).
I'm guessing they did this because they had a suspend-resume bug that was hard to debug, and decided to burn lots of (our) coal instead of fixing their bug. Way to go Adobe!
Re:battery life? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Running single-core (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Turbo Boost technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Who needs that? (Score:3, Interesting)