Intel Arrandale: 32nm for Notebooks, Core i5 540M Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
The Platform
ASUS and Intel partnered up to send us an Arrandale system to test. It's a pre-production K42 notebook.
I won't comment on the build quality because honestly it's not very good. From what ASUS has told me it's already a lot better and we simply have very rough pre-production samples.
Shinebox.
As far as I'm concerned, it served its purpose as it gave me a great platform for measuring Arrandale performance.
I compared its performance to an HP Montevina system. Both systems used 4GB of DDR3-1066 and had CPUs running at 2.53GHz. The Core 2 Duo P8700 was our sample from the previous generation and we compared it to the Core i5-540M.
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Alberto - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
According to www.legitreviews.com/article/1169/15/ and www.legitreviews.com/article/1169/16/ the idle power is very interesting, lower then the older plataform of around 30%.Likely the difference between the two articles is due to a different bios. Moreover Legit has done a lot of tweaks to make the two plataforms comparable (cpu apart). In the battery test, the Monteniva laptop has a 6 cell battery instead of a 8 cell, but the 30% figure seem confirmated.
HotFoot - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
One thing I've often wondered about battery tests is variability in the batteries themselves. Of course, over time batteries wear out and life goes down - but what about the difference between new batteries, even ones of the same rated capacities?I would be interested to see a review such as this one, but where the battery life is tested twice - swapping batteries between platforms and taking the average. Some adaptation will probably be needed. Or, maybe a standard battery testbench used for all battery life tests - which would involve adapters for each notebook.
My point is uncertainty. I know it's not an academic paper, but if the variability in results is 10% or higher (which my gut tells me it very well may be with batteries), the conclusions drawn from the results could be radically different. Maybe it's not that bad, and a few tests into the subject would demonstrate that.
JarredWalton - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I had http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=361...">two Gateway laptops that had the same battery design, only one was Intel-based and the other was AMD-based. After a request similar to yours, I swapped the batteries and retested. Variability was less than 2%, which is the same variability between test runs.kazuha vinland - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Your unit was obviously just a prototype, but can we expect to see the first Arrendale laptops arriving this or next month?webmastir - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
love reading your reviews - very insightful. thanks.8steve8 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
when can we expect reviews of these ULV processors?when can we expect laptops with these ULV processors?
strikeback03 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
And seriously, wtf was intel thinking with these names? 5 processors, all at different speeds, with either 640 or 620 in the name. If a 620LM was the same speed as a 620UM but just used less power I could see it, but there are 3 processors with 620 in the name, running at 1.06, 2.0, and 2.66GHz. The consumer also has to know that a 620M is faster than a 640LM.ET - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I'd love to see more comprehensive mobile benchmarks, but it looks like finally Intel graphics isn't the complete crap it used to be.yuhong - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
On Intel codenames, "Clarksfield" can be easily confused with the desktop "Clarkfield".yuhong - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Oops, I mean Clarkdale by Clarkfield.