Merom reported as a power hungry little heater

Interested in some opinions about the extra watts and heat expected from the CPU and consequent battery life for the M. The TDP I expected was going to be somewhere around the Yonah, but apparently it will not.

In the practical world, what do you think this will be like? GPUs aside, this should negatively affect battery life.

Could it be that the Yonah/945G combination is the best combination of battery/heat/performance? http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3840

 

There's two aspects to this... TDP represents a design specification for thermal solutions and doesn't really tell you the about the absolute maximum (or even average) power consumption of the processors... therefore, you can't really tell if the new Merom generation would really use more power than the old Yonah unless you actually ran tests to try it yourself.

The other aspect is whether the performance per watt is improved over Yonah. Even if the Merom processors are specified to have higher TDP, if they deliver greater performance per watt compared to Yonah (and they do), you will still have a solution that is better overall in terms of battery life.

Anyways - this hardly matters, as Anandtech has already shown that no battery life is lost by going to Merom processors, on an Asus notebook no less.

 

I don't know the specifics and wattages but my old z70va with a p-m 1.86ghz and x700 with NO undervolting could push 4 hours easily without me doing anything special. It can probably get to 4:30 -5:00 with undervolting. I am using a fujitsu right now that is a two year old model that can do four hours easily without trying also and the screen is brighter than many laptops I've seen to date. The downhill nature of battery life as technology advances right now really sucks. I wish I could just get an old Banias stuck into the w3j or w7j and be done with it.

 

Well the new processors now have 2 cores instead of just one so if you compare the power consumption per core it is much lower now. Also, earlier reports have found that merom performs better than yonah and maintains nearly the same battery life (actually offers a few mins more life) so reports that the merom is hot and power hungry aren't exactly accurate.

 

As mentioned TDP is a bad measure of power consumption and heat production. Recall the previous generation of Intels and AMDs. AMD had a lower TDP rating but consumed more power and created more heat.

The higher TDP is expected for the Duo 2. It is practically the same as the Duo but with more Cache, therefore the TDP which refers to max values is expected to be slightly higher. The Duo 2 is expected to overcome the higher consumption at higher CPU usages, with a better sleep state (lower voltages at idle)

 

It's the other way around. AMD are the ones "rounding up" their TDP, while Intel uses a lower figure than is technically accurate. The result is that under load, an Intel CPU frequently generates 15% more heat than the TDP states. While many AMD CPU's never even get near their TDP.

It's all there for you to see if you look up their definitions of TDP on their websites.
AMD defines it as "the maximum amount of heat generated under full load", while Intel defines it as "the maximum amount of heat generated during normal use"

Also, there are quite a few other differences than the bigger cache. Core 2 Duo has a bunch of new features, some obvious (64-bit, bigger cache), and some more subtle ones. But it certainly is *not* just a Core Duo with more cache. (It would be more accurate to say that Core Duo is just a Pentium M with more cache)

Anyway, a more detailed reply to the same question here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=72575&page=3

 

you couldnt put a banias into w3j, intel 915/945 don't support banias

 

Take a look at some real life battery benchmarks. In the benchmarks I have seen... the Merom actually gets 5-10 mins better battery life than a core duo system. It might get hotter, but still gets better battery life...

 

what is the merom equviliant of a t2500? is it the base model or a higher end chip that hasnt come out yet. I mean if you compare a 1.83 yonah to a 2.4ghz merom then you are always going to have better battery/ heat performance with the yonah.

 

Merom is about 20% faster. So a T2500 would be like a merom running at around 1.6ghz. But I thought Merom's started at 1.83.?

 

You can declock it.