i7 Dual Core evaluation/speculation ;)

Hi there!


I'm on the verge of buying a T400, with the T9600 Core 2 Duo, 2.8Ghz

I can get those really cheap and new off from ebay, with dedicated graphics 4GB RAM etc.. all the extras you know what i mean



anyways, i read a roadmap that a new T410 is coming up in february-march

those will probably have i7/i5 dual cores in them.

Now my question was if the performance difference between the T9600 and those new CPU's is going to be significant (more than 40% improvement).


Personally i dont think it's going to be that big of a change, unlike the desktop CPU's the intel CPU's now were already 45nm, and the i7's will stay 45nm..


But hey, i'm asking some of the pro's here, wadda ya think?


Should i go for it now, or wait?

And also, will the price point stay the same?

 

oh, and i forgot to add,

on notebookcheck.com the lowest end quad core i7 holds 11th place in the benchmark list, while the T9600 goes 18th

and in super pi there's only a 200point difference...

850 vs. 1050

 

Anything more than 35 W TDP is not going to be something Lenovo would consider in a compact portable laptop, unless you want the fan staying on all the time and with little battery life.

 

There definitely won't be more than 40% better performance in the most stressful of situations.

 

I would think brute CPU power the change will be 20% or less, but factor in the 2 other cores and HT per core. That is where you'll see the biggest change. Background processes will be handled with many cores to spare. I am excited to see how they handle real world tests/work and not synthetic benchmarks. Sadly I dont think the t410 will have a quad core, rather 14.1 and below will probably be stuck with dual core HT chips. In that case will probably not be as huge a difference from current CPUs.

 

A small correction to OP: the Arrandale i7 processors will be 32nm, and there may be significant power savings compared to the high-end Core2 processors.

 

Y550 is purportedly will be i7 capable, so i would think the new Thinkpad would have a similar capability.

 

The new Y550 use Clarksfield i7s, which are 45nm and quad cores w/ 8 threads. Definitely better than the Arrandale i5/i7s in multithreaded performance but power levels are still around C2D/C2Q at idle/load.

 

This changes the picture somewhat.

 

I agree, but the 14.1 and smaller laptops usually get cheated out of faster CPUs due to size and thermo budgets. Im assuming they will get a dual core variant and not a quad core chip.