No more i7-4600M for the T440p / T540p???

I'm leaning heavily towards buying a T440p and was playing around with various configurations last night... trying to decide between the 17 4600M and the i7 4700MQ. Then when I went online this morning to continue the task I discovered that overnight Lenovo had taken the decision out of my hands, inasmuch as now the only available options are the i3 4000M, the i5 4200M and the i7 4700MQ.

The options for the i5 4300M, i5 4330M and the i5 4600M are gone, along with the 17 4800MQ and the i7 4900MQ.

The same is the case for the T540p. The W540 comes only with the i7 4700MQ (although perhaps this was always the case, I was not paying a lot of attention).

I browsing the sites of the resellers it seems that the 4600M is the most popular offering, followed by the 4300M. I only saw a few machines with the 4700MQ being offered. In any case, so long as I am buying from a reseller I can always get a machine with the 4600M, but I am wondering why these processors got dumped by Lenovo.

 

Maybe, its because Haswell Refresh is around the corner, and the CPUs used in ThinkPads might be updated as well.

 

Thanks for that.

I was not aware of the refresh.

Worth waiting for?

 

I do not think so since Lenovo is always taking their time to refresh the hardware. Haswell was offered after 3-4 months it was out and available on all other brands.

 

Not really - only the W540 was delayed several times. Lenovo had some issues with manufacturing at the end of last year as I heard, so that might also explain it. They were pretty quick with the T440s and most other Haswell models.

And this times, its only the CPUs that is updated.

 

Apologies for quoting myself, but now things have changed.

Firstly, I ought to have mentioned that Lenovo is offering a 5% discount on systems using those three lower-end processors.

Meanwhile, those five higher-end processors are back this morning, but for the purpose of configuration they are segregated in a separate column (titled "Thinkpad T440p Laptop with Faster Processing") but without the discount.

Browsing Lenovo's gazillion model numbers (presumably pre-builds for resellers) I see that almost all are configured with the i7 4600M or the i5 4300M, and almost none with the i7 4700MQ. I'm wondering why this one is so unpopular. Yes, it has a slower base frequency, but it is a quad-core so would therefore be better suited to many tasks, no? Also it's cheaper (and with the 5% discount the savings would be close to $200 on a well-configured system.

 

Weird that the 4700MQ is considered "slower" (or, rather, not "faster"). Yes, it has a slower clock speed, but it also has two more cores than dual-core processors -- far more useful for CPU-intensive tasks IMO.

 

I visited a few web sites where processors are compared... with each other and against benchmarks... and the four-core was consistently rated more highly. Nonetheless, although I really don’t know much about what goes on underneath the keyboard I am guessing that those extra cores will rarely be used in my mundane number-crunching and word-processing tasks, so in real-world usage I suppose the faster dual-core would be better for many users. If I were doing more image manipulation I expect the quad would be better but I have a couple of Macs for those tasks. (My E6410 gets quite bogged down when I ask it to play with Photoshop).

 

Yes, faster-clocked dual-core processors will seem faster if one is just doing one thing on a machine, but quad-core processors will have the edge if there's a lot of multitasking going on, whether between separate programs or within a piece of software (like photo editing or video rendering software). I got a quad core machine (4700MQ) specifically to give a boost to photo and video work. When it comes to web browsing or word processing I really can't tell that my processor is clocking 20MHZ slower than the 4600M.

Intel Core i7 4700MQ vs 4600M

 

To come back to this, the Haswell Refresh CPUs now start to appear in ThinkPads here in Germany - several new models with updated CPUs were announced here in the last days:
- W540 with i7-4810MQ: 20BHS1VP00 Lenovo ThinkPad® University W540 für Studenten - CampusPoint - Notebooks für Studenten, Schüler, Lehrkräfte und natürlich alle Anderen
- T440s with i5-4210U: 20ARS2QF00 Lenovo ThinkPad® University T440s für Studenten - CampusPoint - Notebooks für Studenten, Schüler, Lehrkräfte und natürlich alle Anderen
- X240 with i5-4210U: 20AMS4SM00 - Lenovo ThinkPad® University X240 - CampusPoint - Notebooks für Studenten, Schüler, Lehrkräfte und natürlich alle Anderen
- X240 with i3-4030U: 20AMS4SL00 ThinkPad® X240 Studentenmodell - CampusPoint - Notebooks für Studenten, Schüler, Lehrkräfte und natürlich alle Anderen

Lenovo know also starts to use SSDHs as standard on these new models, as well as NFC and WLAN AC (which wasn´t standard before).