Intel Mobile Penryn Benchmarked: Battery Life Improves Again
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 7, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SSE4 on the Go
Obviously one of the strengths of the Penryn architecture is its SSE4 support. We ran Intel’s TMPEGEnc benchmark, which does take advantage of SSE4 during a movie transcode, and the performance gap widened:
The mobile Penryn based system, because of its SSE4 support, can complete the encoding test in 31% less time than the Merom system. The impact of SSE4 is even more pronounced on the mobile side because of the fact that the mobile chips are already so starved for bandwidth.
The performance gap widened when running a SSE4 optimized VirtualDub 1.7.2 DivX encode, here Penryn would offer a greater than 40% increase in performance.
These SSE4-optimized situations are far more rare than the 1 - 8% increases we saw elsewhere, the point being that should application support develop, Penryn could do much better. Honestly though, we don’t expect a critical mass of SSE4 applications anytime soon, these sorts of things take a long time to materialize.
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sprockkets - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
Looking for cheap 45nm desktop CPUs.I was going to build Intel for my latest customer, but at current prices of the 2.1ghz X2 vs. 1.6ghz Pentiums, AMD won again for being at least $35 cheaper.
eye smite - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
It's interesting to see what intel does, but I'll stick with my turion laptop from 2k5.deeman - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
I think Intel has moved Cantiga forward a bit from Feb/March to 2nd quarter, but not too far for me to think now is the time to upgrade only the CPU and retain the current Santa Rosa chipset.I am happy with my current battery life, but think a huge improvement will come in another quarter when Cantiga / Penryn / and a few other improvements like LED backlit screens, become more available and rolled together. With the chipset change, I am hoping for a much more significant change when largely idle (such as editing) along with the other benefits Cantiga should bring.
My thoughts would be to hold off, but am interested in other opinions on what Cantiga will bring to overall battery life.
somedude1234 - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
These new mobile penryn's seem like the ideal candidates for an ultra-low power HTPC that still has enough power to handle the tough encoding jobs.Does anyone know if any of the motherboard vendors are planning on releasing desktop boards for these new chips?
bugs1109 - Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - link
I think AOpen will release a motherboard that will use this penryn mobile processor. They currently have desktop motherboards that takes mobile cpu.Chris Peredun - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
I hate to be "That Guy" but I'm pretty sure you mean "Battery Life" not "Battery Live."Unless it's a description of the PR walloping that Microsoft is taking over the Xbox Live outage. ;)
Wesley Fink - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
Thanks for the catch. The Title is corrected, but it wil not update until the next refresh, so please be patient for a few minutes.Cygni - Monday, January 7, 2008 - link
Just a heads-up, charts on page 4 are borked. ;)