For a year now Intel has been flaunting its 45nm "Penryn"
processor core with its SSE4 instruction set, High-K metal gate
transistors, and 6MB of L2 cache. Most of the Penryn media attention has
been focused upon the desktop Core 2 processors, but in January at the
2008 Consumer Electronic Show Intel had rolled out sixteen new products
and a dozen of them were mobile oriented. Among these Intel innovations
were the first mobile Penryn processors. These mobile Intel 45nm CPUs
accompanied the Penryn desktop line-up that first began in November of
2007 with Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and then continued with several new Core
2 Quad and Core 2 Duo models. On the server front, the Penryn equivalent
is Harpertown and those quad-core Xeon processors have been shipping for
the same length of time. Today we are focusing upon the Intel Penryn
performance on the mobile front as we explore the Core 2 Duo T9300. The
Core 2 Duo T9300 is running inside a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook and we
have compared its performance against earlier Centrino-based ThinkPads
as we look at how this latest Intel processor performs with Ubuntu Linux.
