Possible improvements on VPC-Z21

I know the brilliant designers browse this kind of forums and they are kind to take advice sometimes (e.g. they added VT, illuminated keyboard, etc)

I know that VPC-Z is nearly perfect and I haven't seen any competition from other brands so far.

However I am still a little picky about the current Z11:

a) I hope when Intel re-stocks LM processors Z21 can offer the 25W TDP option, e.g. i7 620LM. I personally have never ever seen any laptop within 15" that can deal with 35W TDP decently in history. See the Prime95 + Furmark thread for throttling.

b) I hope Sony can offer flexible options to exclude the optical drive. I know Sony wants to make BluRay popular but I don't need it inside a mobile laptop. It would be ideal to use that room for better cooling / battery design in the future. (Yeah I feel sorry that I missed the chance to buy an X505.)

c) I hope Sony can use cooler GPU, preferably DX11 ones from ATI. Currently nVidia is suffering like Intel was in the Pentium 4 ages. (Recall that V505 used ATI Mobility Radeon 9200.)

 

I just have a couple revisions I wish they would do:

- Use an aluminum/carbon fiber palm rest instead of the plastic one used now
- Moving the headphone jack to the right side of the laptop instead of obtrusively placed in front of you.
- More color/pattern options offered in the U.S. upon initial release.
- I agree that more flexible options like optional ODD would be great
- Perhaps engineering a battery slice such as the HP one that covers the entire bottom of the laptop. It looks a bit sleeker (at the cost of adding additional weight that I wouldn't mind)

Other than that, I find that as long as the Z revisions keep consistent with the CPU and GPU upgrades that it will always be far apart from the competition in terms of offering everything in the right package =)

 

User-changeable SSDs. eSata port. Washes my dishes for me.

I can't believe my list is so short... I think it's partly because I have the Japanese version with all options available...

 

Probably not feasible due to FeliCa not working through metal.

This is more of a problem than the designers might have thought, due to the tilt the extended battery causes making the port near unusable.
The question is whether it will need a major redesign to move it over to the side like it was in the old Z.

The US economy is (to put it mildly) not doing well, and the US buyers of the top models are going to be too few to make variety feasible. Add to this that the US bosses have worked hard to turn Sony over to Lean manufacturing, so anything with a potential for increasing unsold stock is very unlikely to happen.

My wishes are:
- A standard HDD/SDD bay instead of the proprietary drive solution.
- Fix the InsydeH20 EFI / BIOS emulator and ACPI bugs that prevents EFI boot, prevents GPT partitioned drives, and prevent a fifth HD from working.
- A non-TN display for Photoshop users who would rather have true hardware 8-bit colour than 2 ns response time.
- A business version (with TPM, can opt for XP, can opt for RAID 1 or JBOD instead of the RAID 0 ricer solution)

 

Another vote for the Intel Core i7-640LM as an option (like the x201s uses.)

In fact it would be great if the the followed Lenovo's lead and had similar to the X201 and X201s a Z and a Zs. With the Zs with the lower voltage processor and optionally no optical drive. That way you can still have a very powerful Z with all day battery life. Not only does the 640LM deliver good performance (on par w/ i-5 430) with less energy usage, the integrated HD graphics are undervolted, which further helps battery life. And it would have turbo-boost and switchable graphics when you need more of a power machine.

 

Oh gosh dreams of a true 8 bit ips screen on a 13 inch. I would probably keep that laptop for the rest of my life

 

Where did you see throttling?? I have not seen this.

 

Well, the TT had it, and that was even smaller!

 

Here is the threat of stress test: http://forum.notebookreview.com/son...ve-enough-test-cooling-ability-new-z11-3.html CPU unable to do TurboBoost

 

1. Metal palmrest (don't care about FeliCa)
2. USB 3.0
3. Plastic cover over the Ethernet port like on the old Z
4. Move headphone jacks to the side
5. BETTER SPEAKERS

This one will never happen, but

1. A modular DVD tray with a internal battery option like in some Lenovo's.

 

ZoinksS2k,
Could u check the PM?

 

Thanks I saw that (and participated in the tests) but am I missing where we are seeing evidence of throttling?

 

sony must put USB3.0.

i am not sure whats going on with the stock on the Z i7 model. it has been out of stock for 2 months, is sony planning on some upgrade??

 

There seems to be a shortage of the mobile processors

Mobile Core i3, i5, i7 shortages continuing | Electronista

 

The official specification from Intel says i7 620M should work at 3.06GHz for both cores when TurboBoost is enabled. However the CPU is actually throttled down to 2.66GHz when the temperature goes up over 90C.

 

Looks like the boost is limited by temperature. Better cooling might help?

This is from Intel ( Increasing Performance with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology)

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology¹ is one of the many exciting new features that Intel has built into latest-generation Intel® microarchitecture codename Nehalem. It automatically allows processor cores to run faster than the base operating frequency if it's operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits.

 

Turbo Boost at work



I think the lack of turbo boost in the situation where both GPU and CPU are stressed (eg. gaming) is possibly because of the design of the cooling system in the new Z - both GPU and CPU are cooled by one heatsink and a fan. If the GPU is stressed it's simply not possible for the heatsink to cool the CPU efficiently and as such turbo boost is disabled according to Intel specification. For applications where only CPU power is required (eg. number cruching) turbo boost would be in effect.

 

A cheaper i3 option? I mean there's not a whole lot separating the Arrandale processors from each other

I second the modular bay feature for swappable optical drive, battery, and harddrive

 

Just visited my local sonystyle and asked about the upcoming Z21. Everything on their system (store worker checked their site) was backordered until June 1st 2010. The price in CDN was just over 2000 (like 2060 or something).

The only thing I wanted to check about was the full HD screen,

It was listed as a $35 upgrade for the full hd screen, seems pretty cheap to me. So hopefully it will be available as it showed, june 1st..

I didn't really check the other info, but it still had the options for various processors (sorry didnt get a good look, but saw i5 and i7 ).

 

I add my voice to the following requests (my favorites are in bold):

I HATE doing the dishes ​

 

I thought of one more: a better dock. I think the current one doesn't support dual-screens, nor does it provide a sufficiently high resolution.

 

What kind of stress test did you do? Did you use Prime95?

 

It wasn't Prime95, just plain Excel number cruching.

 

A brief Prime95 test



During the test, the CPU multiplier moved around between 20x to 23x (between 2.67GHz and 3.06Ghz).

 

It means when the 330M gfx card is idle, then the heatsink is capable of keeping the CPU frequency up. Good news to me

 

Do you have anywhere that confirms this? I just tried searching and couldn't find anything

 

Yes and no. I don't think you quite understand what sort of a trade-off switching to the i7 620LM is. First off running Prime95 and FutureMark at the same time is an unrealistic benchmark. Very few games that I've heard of will max out your graphics card and CPU simultaneously.

For example running FarCry which is admittedly an old game got me peak temperatures of 80C roughly and turbo boost was able to work without throttling for me.

Next realize that TDP is the highest power draw that the CPU is expected to make. This means that when your system is idling it will use MUCH less power. A power meter hinted that when my i7 Z laptop is idling it appears to only use about 9 watts! You really can't shave off more power than that considering that's combined system power use.

Next check out the Wikipedia specs:

List of Intel Core i7 microprocessors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The i7 620M and i7 620LM appears to only vary in cost by about $30. However notice the differences. In the i7 mobile chips, the Intel Graphics Chip is built in. Right away the most obvious difference is that the Intel Graphics chip runs at half the speed.

Also note that voltages and cache are very similar? What does that mean? It means they are more than likely the same chip. One just has it's basic speed limited or failed in the higher speed tests. It comes off the same production line but has probably been certified and locked into the different speeds.

Another point to note is that Turbo Boost is in essence overclocking! It was originally designed for multicores because Intel found you can boost performance by pushing the CPU speeds when not all cores were used. i7's are dual core CPU's. They appear to be 4 via hyperthreading. As such you will get the best turbo boost when the system is running cold or only one core is heavily in use.

Okay so what's all this mean? Well let's say we have two identical cars, one has a speed limiter on it and the other doesn't. The faster car burns more gas when you're racing but that's entirely due to the fact that it goes faster. By adding an LM i7 in what you've done is limited your max performance. Sure you save a little power when the CPU peaks out but that's kind of silly. You could probably change your power management settings and achieve the same thing by limiting your own CPU.

Anyhow, looking at numbers the LM's base speed is 2000mhz, max turbo when 2 cores are in use is 2532mhz, when 1 core is in use 2798mhz.

Looking at the M's base speed is 2667 mhz, max turbo when 2 cores are in use is 3066mhz, when 1 core is in use 3332mhz.

So what's this mean? Well the M will pretty much run faster in any situation than the LM but use a little more power. If you really want your M to act like an LM the simplest act would be to turn off the Turbo and setup the Intel Graphics Acclerator to run slower and presto LM chip power usage.

If these numbers on wikipedia are right, getting the LM would save you $30 which is joke on a 2000 laptop. Plus you've now limited yourself permanently in situations where you're not maxing out the graphics card simultaneously. I'm sure most folks would want to stay with the M processor to have that choice.

 

Anyhow, back on topic, improvements for the a new Z?

1. Disable Touchpad key (FN+F??)
I hate touchpads so I normally disable them and use an external wireless mouse. I find they're too easy to graze when you're typing which results in a misinterpreted drag or even worse click. Wiped out an entire paragraph doing that once. If you're a touch typist there are situations where you're not looking at the screen or keyboard. However it would be nice to be able to turn back on the mousepad with a keystroke in the rare cases that I don't have my mouse handy. Most companies use a keystroke for that but Sony has it buried in their vaio control console. This is a no brainer software fix.

2. What happened to the BIOS fingerprint signon Sony? It was in the previous Z model but somehow Sony removed it. I can't imagine it's that difficult to implement and it was probably one of the cooler features that vanished. Again, probably a programming fix.

3. Standardized 2.5 inch or even 1.8 inch SSD drive. As neat as the proprietary drives are some of Intel's high performance SSDs are nearly as fast as these RAIDed drives so really there's no reason. Yes I know Raid looks cooler on paper and the laptop is a little smaller but still...

4. IPS panel screen... Yeah, we all want this but I suspect then this laptop would be something insanely expensive.

5. Battery Drain... I think this is common to most Z series models. When turned off and the battery is left in the system, it tends to drain a lot of power for something that's not on.

And now Stupid or Unnecessary ideas:

1. Umm maybe use titanium instead of aluminum. It would be great for marketing!

Other comments:

I'm surprised Sony ditched the Firewire port in this new Z although admittedly we gained a well needed extra USB port.

I'm okay with the plastic wrist panel. It's not as cold in the winter times to touch and you don't get shocked as badly from static.

The longer power cable is a welcome upgrade from the old Z although I prefer the cable not going into the powerblock at a 90 degree bend. This causes the cable to bend more at the wire in most situations resulting in it being broken easier.

Seriously thou, these are more like wish lists. I think they did a pretty good job on the Z11...

 

I agree that the i7 switching to non-boost clockspeeds is less than ideal...but it's not the same throttling we are used to dealing with from poor thermal designs. It's called "turbo boost" for a reason

That said, if you enable advanced menus in bios you can adjust throttling priorities (GPU or CPU) and also change the fan/shutdown/throttle temps.

I think the cooling in the z is really impressive.

 

I don't quite agree on this. If you compare 640LM against i5 520M, then you can notice a huge difference in TDP spec while the performance is on par. Recall the Core 2 Duo models: T9800 (35W) is only 10% faster than P9600 (25W) but 40% hotter. It's simply Intel's strategy to play the psychology of rich people - expensive things look good - yet not always true. (Confirmed by tests.)

 

I think the fairer comparison is 6xxM vs 6xxLM. The full voltage part is faster.
Compare a 5xxM to a 5xxLM if you want something to compare the 520M to.

LV CPU's (not to be mistaken for ULV) have always been the red-headed-stepchildren as they cost more, save only a little power/thermal, and are slower than their full powered siblings. Additionally, the oem (sony) is at greater risk of product revs not keeping up with the full-powered parts.

While we are disagreeing (;-) I don't think the comparison you draw between the P9600 and T9800 is all that interesting either. As any overclocker will tell you, increasing clock speeds nearly NEVER scales proportionately with power draw/thermal output. Ignoring the voltage increases required, the amperage draw shoots through the roof. The T9800 was pretty maxed out for that architecture.

 

Im planning on buying a Vaio Z, should I buy it now or there will be another refresh soon ?

 

All I wanted to say is that TDP is the most important concern to me. For old Z the T series (35W) users often heat up over 90C, while we P series (25W) users hardly go over 80C. I wouldn't even care about the performance much. For i5 520M in new Z it's still possible to throttle, regardless of the lower frequency compared against i7 620M - the TDP is still like 35W. The power draw is not linearly proportional to frequency ofc.

If you still want a fair comparison, here it is:

i7 620M: 3.06GHz 35W
i7 640LM: 2.66GHz 25W

620M is 15% faster but 40% hotter than 640LM.

 

Things I would like:
-USB 3.0
-Metal Palmrest
-2x 3.5mm headphone jack on the side
-eSata
-Dock with HDMI out and 2x3.5mm headphone jack.

 

My point is it's an issue of diminishing returns vs. thermals when we crank up clock speeds.

Keep in mind TDP is maximum necessary dissipation...in theory the 620M "could" burn 40% more juice than the 640LM but how often does it?

On that same note, when the 620M is only running at enough load to generate the same performance as the LM part @ 2.66 what is the draw/thermal output? For example if you disabled turbo boost on the 620M what would the TDP/power draw be? Would it be higher than 25W?

 

I think it's more than 25W, as my P9600 cannot reach that temperature (i.e. 98C at 2.66GHz from the stress test thread)

 

These have been mentioned but my votes:

Easy to implement:
1. Better speakers
2. Headphone jack on the sides


More difficult but important
1. IPS screen
2. Standard connectors for HD for future upgrades.
3. Better ramping up of supplies, especially the 1080p screen.

UL

 

Searching for Vaio TT 8-bit gives lots of results.
Including Bring Entertainment to Life

 

Are the i7's hitting 98 on there own or is that "help" coming from the 330M being stressed at the same time? In my system it's the 330M that contributes 10-20% to the cpu temp when stress testing. Remember it's a shared thermal solution.

 

No, it isn't. TDP is "Thermal Design Power", which is a measure for designing cooling solutions. In theoretical terms, it's a rounded up figure for anticipated averaged sustained load under moderate to heavy use.
The 620M can draw more than 50W when taxed heavily, according to tests.

At idle, the 640LM draws around 30% less juice. At full speed, the difference is higher. But some of that can be offset by the 620M finishing the tasks quicker, and going back to idle more often.

For most users, though, the CPU will be running near idle most of the time, so the average power draw from the CPU should be close to 30% lower.

 

Not sure why I didn't add these to my original list, but here are two more:

1. CTO's with all available options (FHD, 512GB SSD, HDD instead of optical drive, etc). I ended up with features on my Z11 I didn't want to get one with the FHD screen.
2. Dedicated Home/End keys. I can live without PgUp and PgDn.

Something like this would work for me.



Note: I suk at Photoshop

Note, part deux: Is this a power discussion or a improvement thread?

 

There was a test in a Chinese forum. Room temperature = 15C. For P9600 (25W) + 9300M GS (13W) stress test it's only 80C for the CPU. However for T9800 (35W) + 9300M GS (13W) stress test it's 90C for the CPU. Not sure about the TDP of 330M, but I don't think it can be much greater than that of 9300M GS.

As arth1 said, the idle power consumption of 35W CPUs (like T series and i7 620M) is also higher, if you check the datasheet from Intel.

 

The X201 and x201s are good comparisons. They really vary little other than have the M vs LM parts. So if you compare their benchmarks and battery life you can get a fair guage of the performance trade-off and energy usage. It won't tell you much about heat, but otherwise tells you most of what you need to know.

Lenovo ThinkPad X201s - Benchmark Test Results

 

When laptopmag compared the x201 to the x201s with the same 9 cell battery they got these results:

X201s: 640LM (2.13 ghz)
X201: 540M (2.53 ghz)

PCMark Vantage:
X201s: 6106
X201: 7050... so 15% faster, but partly do to higher clocked IntelHD graphics

3dMark06
X201s: 1486
X201: 1900... so HD Graphics 22% faster due to higher clock speed, means little when you have switchable graphics like on the Z

Battery Life w/ 9 cell:
X201s: 8h 31m
X201: 7hr 30m

So only a 12% improvement in battery life by switching from the i5-540M to the i7-540LM. IMO this is probably not worth the premium you pay in price or lost performance.

 

Thanks for sharing that comparison.

Note in the comparison you share they are showing an i5 vs an i7lv part. Imagine the performance gap if they compared i7 vs i7lv?

Not to mention the i7 lv part costs significantly more than the standard i5 part.

Either way you slice it, these LV parts don't belong in a Z.

 

Umm you did check on the specifications right?? Keep in mind both the i5 and i7's have an integrated Intel Graphics chip which will likely be calculated into the TDP specification. The i7 640LM has a GPU running at 1/2 the speed of the i5 520M. (266mhz versus 500mhz) Also peak frequencies assuming turbo and 2 cores running for the 640LM is 2.6 Ghz roughly. The 520M is 2.7Ghz. So it shouldn't be surprising there.

The Core 2 Duo's have a much simpler explaination. Take a close look at specifications. Most of the T series processors were 65nm chips. The P series were typically 45nm parts. Common sense tells you that the smaller the physical chip traces, the less power it uses.

What I'm trying to say is that back in the old days, I experimented with undervolting and tweaking the processor in the Pentium M days. I have both a 1.7 Ghz processor and a 2.2 Ghz one. When I limited the speed on the 2.2Ghz to 1.7Ghz, the power handling was identical. In fact they have nearly identical numbers when idling. Basically what I'm telling you is that most of the i7's are identical chips. The only difference should be that the more expensive i7's are tested to run at higher speeds without crashing. They are more "perfect" chips although there's been times when Intel has produced so many chips that they simply disable the higher speeds making it a great chip for overclocking.

Anyhow, the 640LM and 640M represents a difference of $30. On a $2000 laptop $30 is a joke. If you want your 640M to act like a 640LM it's simple. Turn off your turbo-boost and degrade the performance of your Intel graphics by enabling more aggressive power management. And there you go, you now have a 640LM's thermal profile and the choice to boost beyond that if you want to. Unless saving $30 is a priority on a $2000 laptop.

 

Both T9800 and P9600 are 45nm. It's simply P series has better quality so it runs with lower voltage at high frequency. However Intel plays psychology so a high price of T9800 still attracts people who wants ultimate performance.

For Pentium M, none goes over 25W so any difference is neglectable.

Even if 640LM and 620M are using the identical chip, it is still possible that 640LM has better quality - it runs at lower voltage than 620M if both are set to run at 2.66GHz. I wouldn't care about the integrated graphics card performance as there is a 330M. We need some TDP measurement to see if there is a difference between 640LM and 620M, like the huge difference between T9800 and P9600 in the temperature test.

 

Sniper,

You keep referring back to the T9800 vs. P9800. Those were two different classes of CPU's, ableit both 45nm.

I'm not sure what your hangup with temps is. As long as it runs within spec and doesn't burn your lap who cares if one CPU runs 15 degrees hotter than another.

The current CPU's run quite cool until you stress the 330M. In that case I think a ULV part would get hot as the GPU tends to torch everything around it. Look at how the CPU's heatup running furmark WITHOUT prime95 running. A 50 degree cpu gets up to around 80 degrees without even really touching the cpu load.

But again, as long as it's within spec and doesn't cause physical harm, who cares?

 

I would care about temperature.

a) My old SZ, because of the high temperature generated by T7400 (34W), the battery had been very hot most of the time. This increases the risk of explosion, and much more importantly, significantly reduces the lifespan of the battery. It's been well known that the batteries of SZ series usually died within 2 years. Thanks to the improved design of VGN-Z, the battery is no longer hot when the CPU burns up to 90C.

b) The lifespan of electronic parts is reduced by 50% for each 10C of temperature increase. This is why I changed the motherboard of my desktop for better spacing, only to reduce the temperature of crossfire cards. High temperature is also causing fan noise, as well as high voltage and high power consumption.

c) Most importantly, it makes certain keys very hot - for VGN-Z, it's the "1", "2", "3", "Q", "W", "E" keys which are very hot to touch when CPU and GPU heats up. This is unacceptable for playing games. (Why would I need nVidia card if I don't play games? I do have a desktop but sometimes I still play games with laptop.)

There is no way I would accept 35W CPUs inside a laptop smaller than 15", as I have never seen one which can handle decently, since 2004.

Note that there are only 2 physical cores in 620M, and Furmark would stress one core of 620M to around 99% (Check Windows Task Manager). The TDP of 330M should still be within the 15W range, just like the 9300M GS. Wouldn't you agree that I should conclude 620M is guilty for such temperature?

 

What are you talking about? A processor's TDP being lower than another's has nothing to do with its quality.