i7 quad or i7 dual arrandale?

Is there a big performance difference between i7 (arrandales) and current i7 quad? the battery life really sucks with current i7? im still not sure what to do... cause i need a laptop now...

I can already order the new i7 620m arrandale?

 

You probably won't get a dual core i7 into your hands for a few more months... Performance really depends on what applications you're going to be using.

 

few more months, i doubt since its on pre-order... if its a month im still ok with ordering.

well i use it for gaming and school. im looking into using this new notebook for the next 3-4 years and would like the best out of the two.

also considering battery lifetime, will 45w old i7 to i7 arrandale 35 watt make a big difference?

 

Pre-orders can go for a long time; pre-orders for some other new notebooks have gone up half a year before they started shipping. As for battery life, it's hard to say and will depend entirely on the design of the notebook. The wattages you've quoted are TDP and not power requirements; it's a measure of how much heat the processor should put out at full load. At idle, my guess would be that the battery times should be about comparable; they'll both shutdown all cores but one and run just on that one. Arrandale may get some advantage in battery life if the notebook is setup to use the integrated graphics (compared to an i7 in the same notebook, which means that that model would have to have dedicated graphics as well), but at that point, we're again talking about notebook design.

Note that according to Intel, you can just drop an Arrandale into a current Clarksfield notebook and it should work fine (with the appropriate BIOS update), except that you probably won't have access to the IGP. In a case like that, I'd probably expect roughly similar battery life, maybe slightly better with the Arrandale, depending on usage.