I’ll let you into a little secret; I’m an AMD fanboy. I like rooting for the underdog, and that’s AMD at the moment. I also think that Intel is a bit of an evil empire; they were bullies back when AMD had truly competitive product, and so now Intel remains an effective monopoly, while AMD is fighting for table scraps.
That aside, I can’t deny that Intel has some damn smart engineers, and it appears that they’ve pulled another rabbit out of their hat.
I came upon the magic while browsing The Tech Report’s piece called . I love the Tech Report, and they’ve dove out in front of the crowd with this one, putting up the first in-depth Sandy Bridge mobile review to meet my eyes. I was initially a bit disappointed, however, because the processor they tested is just a Core i7-2820QM. Intel’s Core i7 mobile processors have always been the more underwhelming; sure, the performance is great, but you’re lucky to receive more than two and half hours of battery life. That’s not the kind of laptop Smidgen PC tends to praise.
Already sure that the results of this review would be flat, I wandered over to the battery life section. Then I shit my pants.
Yes, that’s right. The Core i7-2820QM, which is a quad-core processor with eight threads, lasted longer than the U33JC, Eee PC 1015PN, and Toshiba T235D in web surfing tests. That’s a full six hours of battery life with a quad-core processor. That’s incredible. Unprecedented. Nothing I’ve seen gave any reason to indicate that this would happen.
Granted, this was with a large battery, but the ASUS U33JC has an ever larger battery, and the battery on the Toshiba T235D is only a little smaller. I know, because I reviewed both of those laptops for PC Perspective. Sandy Bridge laptop processors seem set to take laptop battery life to an entirely new level – which is bad news for AMD, of course, because the company’s mainstream dual and quad-core processors are notoriously power-hungry and haven’t been updated in some time. Hell, some of them are still manufactured on a 65nm process.
You’re not giving up performance for this, either. The Tech Report’s benchmarks showed the Core i7-2820QM easily beating all comers. In the 7-Zip compression bench, for example, the new Sandy Bridge laptop processor achieved a score of 17756. For comparison, I recently tested a Core i7 quad-core laptop with the last-gen technology, and it achieved a score of 11445.
It’s rare that a new generation of product provides such substantial improvements over previous technology. The fact that Intel hasn’t been tooting its own horn about these new processors makes the results even more surprising. If you’re in the market for a laptop right now, I highly recommend waiting; the new Sandy Bridge laptop processors are poised to beat the snot out of every other processor currently available.
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