Digital Home Thoughts: Laptops get the Core i7 Treatment

"When it arrived on the desktop scene, Intel’s Core i7 levelled the opposition. With enough power to embarrass Intel’s own Core 2 architecture, not to mention AMD’s efforts, and coming at a cost that would make even a banker weep, Core i7 set the benchmark and set it high. Now it’s set to repeat the trick in the laptop market, and we’ve got our hands on a sample boasting the mid-range quad-core 1.73GHz i7-820QM."

With the recent announcement of the updated Core i7 CPUs, Intel is looking to bringing the number crunching wonder to the laptop world. PC Pro has a peek at what we can expect from laptops equipped with the Core i7 hotness and what extras Intel has tossed into the mix that could see better battery life, well, for performance oriented laptops at least. TurboBoost definitely looks interesting, and I can see many applications where it could help things along, such as encoding videos, file compression and the like. Still, I do not see Core i7 laptops being available for anyone but the mid to upper range laptops for a while, especially with cost concerns and a draw of 74 watts. Of course, wait long enough, and we will eventually see netbooks offering this kind of number crunching muscle.