anyone think the notebooks are due a refresh ?

What will be the main advantages of Arrandale? I'm asking because I recommend the Latitude series to a lot of people (Dell really should pay me something ) and was wondering if in some cases it might be worth the wait.

 

M6400s will be refreshed in the next 3 months or so.
Already the M6500 is being tested in qual build...drivers/hardware issues etc.

 

The main benefit is for those that require CPU power (ie. encoding, rendering, calculations) at an equal or lower power consumption than current models. Another big benefit will be integrated GPU on CPU die, so all notebooks should get another boost in battery life and/or have the capability of switchable graphics for when you need it.

Most companies should be testing Clarksfield and Arrandale notebooks in the next little while but you won't hear about them due to NDA. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6500 comes out before the M2500 and M4500 (speculating on the names here), since Clarksfield will be released shortly (a few months before Arrandale) and they use the same chipset, so it would be a simple matter of just adding lower end options in the future for those on a tighter budget.

 

I would just like to add more padding to the E6400's bezel and palm rest. Everything else I'm happy with.

 

This is correct, currently Intel's C2D penryn processors come in 4 TDP levels: 10W (Ultra Low Voltage), 17W(Low Voltage), 25W(standard voltage), and 35W(standard voltage). These chips, when paired with Intel's 4500MHD integrated graphics chipset adds another 12W, so you get a total of 22W, 29W, 37W, and 47W respectively.

Arrandale comes with integrated graphics on the same chip as the processor and will have 3 TDP flavors 18W(ULV), 25W(LV), and 35W(Standard voltage).

If you compare these numbers to the penryn+integrated graphics numbers (which is the proper comparison; many people compare to the bare processor TDP and mistakenly complain about nehalem using more power than penryn) then you can see that Arrandale is using less power at each TDP level (ULV,LV, etc) and the top TDP level of penryn has been removed; Intel must be assuming that people wanting that much processor power would go for Clarksfield + dedicated graphics.

The new Arrandale chips will also be more powerful than penryn at the same clock speed. And there's more, even though Arrandales have lower base clock speed than the equivalent penryns they are replacing they have turbo mode so they can boost single core clock speed when possible and also have multi-threading capability.

Reference:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Newsentry.153+M51a13ddfc24.0.html

 

they have many many more refinements over the c2d's like the mentioned turbo boost for poorly threaded apps it will overclock itself considerably on one or 2 cores while reducing the speed and voltage to the remainining cores to get the task done quicker and get the whole cpu into a lower power state and make everything much more efficient and theres the usual new instructions and extensions added to the existing ones

its the new generation not an evolution , im pretty sure this will be intels so called tick which is then followed by a refined version which will be called the tock and then back to new generation of cpu's in there tick tock timing

 

penryn was a "tick", a die shrink
arrandale is also a "tick", a die shrink from the skipped havendale/aurburndale generation (which would have been a 45nm dual core based upon nahalem).

Sandy bridge is the next gen, which will be a "tock"
Ivy Bridge is the "tick" based on the sandy bridge micro-architecture.

more details: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3648 and http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/clarkdale-sneakpeek.html