Core Duo notebooks are literally hot

Some suspected that the elephant in the room for the Core Duo (Yonah) is battery life. Tomshardware measured the battery life of a Turion 64 notebook, a Pentium-M 32 bit notebook, and a 65nm 32 bit Core Duo notebook, and found that Core Duo uses almost twice the power as the Turion 64. When viewing DVDs, the Core Duo T2500 (2GHZ) consumes 34.1 watts, the Turion 64 ML-40 (2.2GHZ) consumes 19.1 watts. When reading, the Core Duo T2500 consumes 31.3 watts, the Turion 64 ML-40 consumes 15.9 watts. While using office software, the Core Duo T2500 consumes 33.1 watts, and the ML-40 notebook consumes 16.9 watts. The Core Duo notebook consumes almost twice the power than the HP ML-40 notebook.

Please note, in all these tests (DVD playing, reading and office), only one CPU core is needed, therefore one of the Core Duo's two cores was shut down during the tests, yet the system power consumption was as high as 34 watts. In a previous article, based on an AnandTech measurement, I estimated that the 65nm 32 bit Core Duo (Yonah) 2GHZ is at least 53 watts when its two cores are running at full speed. In comparison, AMD's 2GHZ dual core 64 bit server chip the Opteron 870HE is 55 watt max.

INTEL claimed that if 64 bit capability was added to Core Duo, battery life would have been even shorter. My guess is that the amateurish INTEL design team in the middle-east haven't figured out how to copy the AMD64 instruction sets invented by grand masters at AMD.

No wonder the 32 bit Core Duo notebook tested uses a massive 71wh battery, while the HP nx6125 equipped with a Turion ML-40 only uses a 48wh battery.

Again, why HP is using the Turion ML instead of the low power Turion MT.