New Centrino Drains Battery
Today in San Francisco, Intel unveiled its new Centrino line, code-named Sonoma. I am based in San Francisco but actually writing this from Sonoma, but I digress...the real news of the day is that the CPU is faster but possibly at the expense of battery life in some notebooks.

This is what Extreme Tech had to report: "Although Intel has aggressively power-managed the platform – for example, cutting the chipset's internal clock by half – the combination of one new feature, PCI Express, and the faster processor speeds may result in a slight decrease in battery life, one executive at IBM said. Shortages in third-party graphics accelerators have also slowed down IBM's launch of its new Sonoma-based ThinkPad notebooks, pushing their shipment out into February, he said.

"Measurements of battery life are heavily dependent on a variety of factors, such as the amount of power relegated to the display's backlight, whether the laptop is engaged in heavy disk or processing activity, or accessing an optical CD or DVD through the power-hungry mechanical drive.

"Still, the dip in battery life was somewhat disappointing, according to Bill Iori, worldwide marketing manager for IBM's ThinkPad notebook computers. "For our purposes there's a slight reduction in overall battery life from PCI Express and the new processor levels, which isn't very surprising," he said. "At the same time we were hoping for higher levels of battery life."

Iori said he believed the difference in battery life would be more pronounced in a ThinkPad than notebooks from other manufacturers because of the aggressive power management IBM implemented in older ThinkPad models. IBM is quoting a 4-hour average ba"ttery life for a 6-cell Li-ion battery and six hours with a 9-cell battery.

So let's recap. Alice in Sonoma, Sonoma in San Francisco and Alice's next ThinkPad: low battery life. That's what I call a bad day!


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