OldCorpse said:
According to this article from ai, merom looks to be something of a disappointment. First it'll be hotter than Intel previously advertised. Second, battery life will be worse, and actually perform worse than Yonah by some measures:
"in battery mode, Merom processors clock down to 1GHz, yet still carry a TDP of 20 watts, according to DailyTech. On the other hand, a Yonah chip in the same mode has a TDP of 13.1 watts while also at 1GHz."
Meh, this is what we're waiting for? Pft!
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1975
I looked at it, and it seems like we have a clueless thread based on a clueless article is based on another clueless article based on a lack of understanding of the subject matter.
TDP means "Thermal Design Power". It means that a designer, like the designers of the MacBook, must design the computer so that it won't be damaged if the processor uses that much power. So Intel decided to tell designers "make sure that your laptop doesn't melt if the processor uses 20 Watts in low-power mode". TDP is just advice for the designers, it has nothing to do with the actual power use. As an example, Intel gives the same TDP numbers for Conroe chips running at different clock speeds, where clearly these chips cannot use the same power. Let's just say that if Dell had designed their laptops a bit more generous for a bit higher TDP, then some laptops might not have exploded and Dell could have saved themselves about 300 million dollars.
Just a little bit of reality check: Power consumption is proportional to clock speed multiplied by voltage squared. If Merom uses up to 34 Watt at 2.0 GHz, then it cannot possibly use more than 17 Watt at 1.0 GHz, even without voltage reduction. I very much suspect that the original article has just confused some numbers.
The maximum power used by Merom will be higher for the simple reason that it can execute more instructions per second. If Merom does twenty percent more work per second, that doesn't come for free. But that is no problem, what might happen is that the battery is empty earlier with the work done, while with Yonah the battery might last a bit longer but not be capable of finishing the work! But in typical usage, the full speed of the processor is not needed. In these cases, Merom can be switched to a lower speed than Yonah. Yonah would need to run at 1.1 GHz where Merom can do the same work at 1.0 GHz, making Merom use less energy.
Conclusion: If you measure "shortest possible time to empty batteries", Merom will do that slightly quicker. But if you measure how long your batteries last, doing exactly the same work on Merom and Yonah, Merom will last longer.
You can play the waiting game forever
