Westlake Village CA) and Munich (Germany) - Tom’s Hardware has published its first in-depth review of a prototype notebook equipped with Intel’s dual-core "Core Duo" processor. While the device demonstrated convincing performance, the system’s surprisingly high power consumption leaves questions to be answered in the future.

The engineers took an Asus A6JA, the first Core Duo notebook we got our hands on, through an extensive test parcours that evaluated detailed performance capabilities of Intel’s latest processor.

The notebook came with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo T2500 processor and delivered the performance Intel promised - according to the engineers a 30 to 50% gain over a 2.0 GHz Pentium M processor in multitasking environments. Harald Thon, author of the review described the CPU as "genuinely exciting stuff" and concluded that "it is definitely one of the most efficient and energy saving (mobile) processors we’ve ever seen,"

The system overall consumed an unexpected large amount of power, which Thon believes cannot be blamed on the CPU, but most likely on the high end graphics chip, an ATI X1600 with 512 MB of memory. However, sources recently also indicated a possible implementation problem of the USB 2.0 interface in the ICH7-M Southbridge, which could have a significant impact on the notebooks running time.

Read the complete review here :
Will Core Duo Notebooks Trade Battery Life For Quicker Response ?