Intel's Core Duo Launch - Notebook Performance Revealed

Battery Life - Business Applications

While the performance of these laptops was very similar when running on AC power, unplugging them and focusing on battery life and performance changes the landscape dramatically.  For our battery life tests, we turn to MobileMark 2005, which offers a total of four battery life measurement tools - the first one being the Office Productivity 2002SE benchmark.

The Office Productivity 2002SE benchmark does the following:

The workloads in this category model a mobile professional at a fictitious automobile company. The worker creates documents using Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, accesses email, and creates graphics and animation with Photoshop and Flash to include in a multimedia presentation. An Internet browser is used to view presentations. The user also invokes file compression and virus detection in the background.

Microsoft Word 2002: The user starts Microsoft Word and opens an eight-page assembly manual document for a new transmission system. The user sets paragraph formatting, font configuration and adds text to the document. The user inserts an image, a table of contents and a table of figures. Twenty additional images, ranging in size from 3 Kb to 15 Kb are inserted throughout the document. The user then adds a watermark to the document and performs a global find and replace. The document is printed and the user inserts a hyperlink into the document and adds more text. The user inserts a training video, changes the theme and saves the document in web page format. Later, the user returns to Word and opens a book to read. The user auto-summarizes the book to generate a shorter synopsis.

Microsoft Excel 2002: The user starts Microsoft Excel and opens a large spreadsheet (a 12 megabyte file with approximately 3000 rows and 248 columns of data). The user selects a group of formulae for data analysis. The user selects the data and performs a sort, using three key fields. This data is then used to create a chart, which is exported to a web page. The user then opens a different spreadsheet (an 8.5 megabyte file with approximately 2100 rows and 248 columns of data), and performs similar operations, resulting in another web page.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2002: The user starts Microsoft PowerPoint and opens a 24 slide presentation of the previous quarter's news and sales. The user moves through the presentation inserting and positioning several images (47 to 57 kilobytes in size). Upon completing this, the presentation is checked for spelling errors. The user then applies different themes/backgrounds to the presentation and selects one. Finally, the user reviews the material in slide show mode and exports the finished presentation to web page format.

Microsoft Outlook 2002: The user starts Microsoft Outlook and opens the inbox, changing the view mode to show the first lines of each message. The email editor, Word, is launched, and a document is opened, printed, and sent to an email recipient. The user then opens one of the documents in the inbox, adds a picture as an attachment, and emails it. Moving to the Draft folder, the user opens three email messages: the first has its spelling checked and is sent, the second is sent and the third is checked for spelling, summarized and sent. Three more messages are created and sent with attached images. Finally, the user compresses the Outlook offline folder.

Netscape Communicator 6.01: The user opens the Netscape browser and loads an HTML version of a Word document. The source HTML code is then viewed. The user also views two charts exported to HTML from an Excel file. Finally, the user browses through a 15-page PowerPoint slide show that was saved in HTML format.

WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0: The user creates a compressed data file from a set of bitmap files (7.6 megabytes total size) in a specific folder. The resulting .zip file is 54% of the size of the original group of files. Once started, the user moves this to the background and works with other applications.

McAfee VirusScan 5.13: The user scans program files (3,110 files and 438MB) for the presence of viruses. This is run in the background as the user works.

Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1: The user starts Adobe Photoshop and sets the workplace. A 7.12MB high-definition source file is opened and the image is sized to fit in the window. The user performs image manipulations, including Smart Blur, Distort Wave, and rotation. Finally, the user re-sizes the image and adjusts the image color levels before saving the image as a web-friendly 20kilobyte JPEG file.

Macromedia Flash 5: The user creates a Flash animation using text, graphics and still images. The user works in an existing Flash animation, adding, then manipulating and positioning a new image to appear appropriately within the final animation. To do this, the user starts Macromedia Flash and opens a preconfigured project (FLA) file, containing 23 different layers. The user moves down to one of the layers in the project file, deletes the key frame and imports a new image of a person in a kayak (a 24-bit color, 72 dpi, 300 x 211 resolution PNG format image with transparency). This image is then manipulated (rotated, flipped) and positioned appropriately within the frame and is then grouped into an instance. Finally, the user exports the animation to a web ready SWF file using 100 percent jpeg compression.

The performance story of Yonah vs. Dothan is nothing new, but the battery life of these two notebooks is what really blew us away. The Core Duo laptop was able to give us 30 more minutes of battery life than the Sonoma based W5A. We even swapped batteries to make sure that our results were legitimate and they were, even using the same battery as the W5F notebook, the W5A had a 30 minute shorter battery life. Mooly promised us no worse battery life than Dothan, and it looks like he under promised and over delivered as usual.

MobileMark 2005's Office Productivity 2002SE test also produces a performance score, to accompany the battery life metric in showing you how fast the notebooks were while on battery power:

While offering 14.5% longer battery life, the Core Duo notebook also brought us a 16.6% increase in performance. More performance and longer battery life? Who could ask for anything more?