Mobile Core i7 920XM, Clarksfield: Nehalem on-the-go

Initial Thoughts

It's good to finally see an official Nehalem CPU for the mobile sector. Power gate transistors have the potential to seriously improve battery life, and we can't wait to see that sort of technology begin making its way into GPUs and chipsets as well as processors. In terms of performance, things are a little bit of a mixed bag.

Certainly the i7-920XM is a fast processor; the problem is that it's also a relatively power hungry processor, and without a larger battery users of the W87CU can expect roughly the same one hour of battery life you get with other desktop replacements. As long as you understand you're getting a desktop replacement, however, the W87CU should work fine. The real problem isn't competition from the mobile sector per se, but rather the notebooks that use desktop CPUs - specifically desktop i7 CPUs. If you don't care that much about battery life, wouldn't you rather have a desktop replacement with a $1000 Core i7-975 instead of a $1000 Core i7 920? If you're wealthy it probably doesn't matter much, but the rest of us will need to think very carefully about how much we want a faster laptop before taking the Clarksfield plunge. For CPU intensive tasks, the AVADirect D900F system can easily outperform a W87CU for about the same price (though it does weigh more).

If there's anything Clarksfield shows us, it's that we really want Arrandale - sooner rather than later. Quad-core processors simply aren't a major need for the vast majority of laptop users, and the higher prices and higher maximum TDP make them less desirable. Arrandale should do a great job at addressing both of those shortcomings, and the same goes for Clarkdale on the desktop. Lower power dual-core processors with Hyper-Threading will still have the ability to run four simultaneous threads, and they should also be able to run at higher clock speeds most of the time.

We will have additional benchmark results and discussion of the pros and cons of the various laptops tested in this article in the near future. Considering pricing is similar on all three models, however, users will need to decide what they want most. Mobile gamers will definitely want something with dual graphics capability, and content creators will prefer something similar to the D900F. The question is, who fits in the middle? Clarksfield could go either way, offering a reasonable blend of CPU performance and power requirements. It's almost inevitable that we will see Clarksfield laptops in the future that also offer dual GPUs, at which point we might be onto the next Intel "Tock". However you look at it, high-end laptop users just got some new choices, and freedom of choice is always a good thing.