CES2008: Penryn notebooks - T9500 review

Anandtech has managed to grab one of Dell's notebooks at CES that had a Penryn CPU, in this case the T9500. It's a 2.6GHz dual-core with 6MB of L2 cache, nothing spectacular, but enough to grab some interesting details.

Since the T9500 works with the same clockspeed as the T7800, they have got a fair comparison here. The Penryn obviously comes out on top when it comes to power consumption and, consequently, battery life. They attribute this to the reduction in input voltage but the process enhancements surely also play a role, since this process, with metal gates, is expected to have less current leakage than the previous one.
I was expecting a bigger improvement from these new CPUs, like 1.0V standard instead of 1.15V, since they aren't really pushing the clockspeeds that much. Then again, this is just an engineering sample and Intel could be having some small problems with the first samples. The extra cache also uses up some power.

But what they missed was that Intel already has CPUs that use that voltage or even less, so we can't jump to conclusions so soon. Intel is a mess when it comes to TDPs. They already have T7800 steppings that use less voltage, 1.175V or less, depending on binning. Heck, even some are stated clearly in Intel's site, tough this one runs at less speed.
They don't specify for the others and even have some 45nm CPUs already there, but something should be a typo - something better be - 1.25V maximum VID on a 45nm states that something is clearly wrong.

If they can make desktop CPUs use less than 30W, they have the means to produce something great for laptops, like a quad-core with good power consumption - less than 35W - even if they have to compromise on yields and a bit in clock-speed, after all CPU binning exists for something. After all if the 2.66GHz E8200 can go below 30W, carefully binned CPUs like the mobile Penryns should be going below 20W at 2.6GHz, or should be getting 3GHz with similar TDPs and not being limited by 2.8GHz like the X9000. Again, the E8500 measured 33W, running at 3.16GHz. If I was looking for a laptop, I would be a bit pissed off - you pay more for these CPUs and get worse stuff.

The question is if Intel wants to, or if they rather keep cashing in, while the gap between laptops and desktops keeps increasing further and further away from what it was when the Banias and Dothan were released. It's not like they have competition nowadays.
Keywords: Core 2 Duo T9500 TDP voltage T7800 X9000