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The Pied Piper of Penryn
10 April, 2008 in CPU
Intel's Santa Rosa refresh (Penryn) is in full swing right now, and the tech-savvy are slavering at the thought of those tiny 45 nm processing cores and what they can do to improve system performance. The smaller processing core's biggest claim to fame is that it uses less power and it runs cooler than the older 65 nm processors. The big question for most customers, however, is whether Penryn actually lives up to these promises.
There have not been any published heat benchmarks, but most reviewers have stated that they did not see a large heat output change when switching from Merom processors to Penryn processors. There has been a measurable, if somewhat small, increase in battery life, however, and these increases naturally depend on how much you happen to be using the processor versus how much you are using the other components in your system.
In two identically configured notebooks, the measured battery life increase ranged from a 5.6% increase when the notebook was doing absolutely nothing but sitting there powered on to a 16.5% increase under general use, where the processor was the main part being used. The average battery life improvement was around 10%, which will equate roughly to about 10-20 minutes, depending on a notebook's general battery life.
So heat and battery life are not significantly affected, but the fact remains that Intel has been able to squeeze more power out of these tiny chips, and generally at an equal-or-better price to the older Merom processors.
Intel's other big selling point for Penryn is the SSE4 extension set they introduced with the Penryn refresh. SSE stands for Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Extensions, and SSE instructions have been used since the Pentium III was introduced in 1999. These additional extensions (and they have multiplied with each new SSE release) allow program designers to optimize their software significantly to improve performance versus systems without SSE (in this case SSE4) support.
The problem, of course, is that developers can't really begin supporting a new SSE format until it has been released, so very few programs currently on the market actually use SSE4 extensions, but those few that do (mainly tech demos or high-end workstation software) show performance increases as high as 40% over identically configured Merom systems.
If your applications are not optimized for SSE4, you will still see a tiny improvement (around 5%) over an identically configured Merom system. Is this enough to justify an upgrade? Only you can say for sure, but keep in mind that a 5% performance increase is small enough that you might have trouble actually seeing the difference if you put a Merom and Penryn system side by side to compare.
The long and short of it all is this: if you've already bought a notebook recently and are runing a Merom-based T7xxx processor, you probably weren't looking to upgrade just yet, anyway. If you are reaching the point where an upgrade might be advisable, though, the Penryn is a solid successor to the Merom. It may be an evolution, rather than a revolution, but it is a performance enhancement you can use, and the higher speeds and increased cache size of the T9xxx processors mean that a Penryn system will serve you well, indeed.