First look: Penryn mobile chip smashes laptop record

 

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By David Bayon

Posted on 21 Jan 2008 at 11:36

Just weeks after Intel announced its new line of 45nm Penryn mobile processors at CES 2008, PC Pro has its hands on one of the first notebooks to use the technology - and we can reveal that it's fast. Very fast.

Read our full review of the first laptop to feature the new Penryn processor.

Intel claims the new Core 2 Duo T9000-series processors will give a "modest 5-12% improvement in performance" with no extra power drain. This is thanks to the move to the 45nm fabrication process, which allows more performance to be squeezed from the CPU without raising the already low 35W thermal design power (TDP).

The family will initially consist of 2.5GHz T9300 and 2.6GHz T9500 models, both with a 6MB shared L2 cache and an 800MHz front side bus.

We can't compare our sample directly as there is no 2.5GHz 65nm part, but a recently reviewed laptop based around a 2.6GHz T7800 - the top-end 65nm part - scored 1.25 in our benchmarks. A 2.4GHz T7700 managed just 1.16.

By contrast, the new Asus M50SV notebook - with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9300 inside - romped through our benchmarks to score a staggering 1.32. The more efficient architecture, coupled with the increase in L2 cache, makes it the fastest mobile processor we've ever tested at PC Pro.

It's early days for Penryn, and we look forward to finding out how much faster still the top-end 2.6GHz T9500 may prove to be, but from these initial results it's looking like Intel has done it again.

Click here to read our full review of the Asus M50SV - including our thoughts on battery life and the latest Nvidia GeForce 9500M GS graphics chip.