Intel has started shipping a couple of new low-voltage processors designed to help make tiny laptops faster. The Core 2 Duo L7200 and L7400 chips, clocked at 1.05GHz and 1.33GHz respectively, have a fast 667MHz front-side bus and a monstrous 4MB of shared level 2 cache.
The chips are said to have a thermal design power (TDP) of 17W, which sounds good on paper, but we wonder just how much benefit this will bring the consumer. If you're buying an ultraportable and your main concern is battery life, you're probably better off getting an ultra low-voltage chip such as the 1.06GHz U2400 CPU in the Asus U1 -- which has a TDP of 9W.
If there's one complaint we have with ultraportables it's the fact they run out of battery power when we're right in the middle of something -- not that they don't run our 3D rendering software.
Intel, sort your life out: We know you're constantly chasing Moore's law, but how about following Crave's law, which states it would be really, really nice if laptop battery life should double once every 18 months.
Get on it! -RR
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