Intel Corei7-820QM Mobile CPU Benchmarks
The Mighty Nehalem CPU comes to the mobile platform and we measure its performance.
Intel launched their new Nehalem based Core i7 mobile CPUs in Dubai yesterday. The following three CPUs are going to be initially available under the Core i7 umbrella at the moment along with some specifications
| Core i7-720QM | Core i7-820QM | Core i7-920XM | |
| Frequency | 1.60GHz | 1.73GHz | 2.0GHz |
| Smart Cache | 6MB | 8MB | 8MB |
| Turbo Boost | 2.80GHz | 3.06GHz | 3.2GHz |
| Cores/Threads | 4/8 | 4/8 | 4/8 |
All the new CPUs have an integrated memory controller supporting dual channel DDR3-1333MHz while the 920XM also supports XMP.Along with the CPUs, the PM55 Express chipset also makes an appearance.The new chipset supports 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 PCI Express 2.0 Graphics which will allow for some pretty awesome gaming experience in desktop replacements.
Although it may be a couple of weeks before we start getting notebooks based on the new Core i7 platform, we managed to borrow an unbranded notebook from Intel for a few quick tests with PCMark Vantage. The notebook we tested is based on the 820QM CPU running at 1.73GHz. It had 2GB of RAM and an nVidia GTX 260M GPU. The following is a result of PCMark Vantage on this notebook compared to the HP HDX (P8400- 2.26GHz CPU) and the ASUS G51 (T9600- 2.8GHz CPU) notebooks.
Quite a noticeable difference with the Core i7 CPU, especially with Gaming. One thing you don’t see up there are Hard Disk scores which were a bit lower on the test sample we received meaning there is possibility of scores increasing further with a faster drive. All I can say is that its looking good for the Core i7 in the mobile arena. It would certainly be interesting to see how battery levels compare but for that, we might have to wait for a retail sample.
