santa rosa

I'm looking at buying a new laptop right now, and what's the deal with santa rosa? I mean from people who have used it especially now, does it really overheat more? And does its increased power mean loss of battery life, especially since (Im not sure if i'm right) I've read at some places that they should supposedly actually a LONGER batter life then non santa rosas?
Thanks!

 

Supposedly Santa Rosa is supposed to offer longer battery life, though I can't see a huge difference. In some models battery life seems to decrease, though I've actually seen an increase in the D620 vs D630. The Santa Rosa model's I've used don't seem to run too much hotter when idling, though of course if you run at max CPU you'll see more heat and power drain, simply because it's a more powerful chipset.

 

Could it just be coincidental that some with Santa Rosa chips sense more heat? Could it be that many of the newer platforms with Santa Rosa are shipping with better video cards and they draw more current and casue more heat? The chips themseles are supposed to draw less from what I remember.

 

They actually draw more power at their maximum performance. Lucky, a cpu almost never reaches 100% load in most applications. The advantage of the Santa Rosa platform is scalability. It can shut down an unused core, scale bus and dump its cache for hibernation. If the battery test used taxes the cpu to 100% it will appear as if battery life decreased. However, in the vast majority of cases you should see better battery life.