Thinkpads Forum

I have a W700 with the quad-core extreme processor. I use it for software demos. It's a bit big to haul around, so I was hoping that some of the new Thinkpads would offer the same speed in a smaller package. However, the quad core i7 in the W510 looks to be quite a bit slower than the current chip - am I missing something?

Apply a 30% Nehalem bonus before comparing them (only if you can't find applicable benchmark results, of course). More for anything that doesn't use all cores - the 920XM can go as high as 3.2 GHz.

For any kind of scientific, or image processing application, or anything that uses floating point math heavily..you'll see a 50-75% perf boost at same clock speed. Memory bandwidth (with 3 matched DIMMS) should be almost 2x. And for single threaded apps, like the previous poster mentions, take into account Turbo mode.

Don't forget that much of the bottleneck and speed reduction in current laptops is hard drive speed. I've installed two SSD drives in my W500 with great success and turned this ThinkPad into a veritable rocket.

Cheers...

As for graphics GPU, isn't the W510 GPU much more powerful than W500's GPU?

W510 got 1 GB video RAM, vs W500 got 512 MB
W510 GPU much faster than W500 (it's been almost 2 years since W500 launch)

Proteus wrote:For any kind of scientific, or image processing application, or anything that uses floating point math heavily..you'll see a 50-75% perf boost at same clock speed. Memory bandwidth (with 3 matched DIMMS) should be almost 2x. And for single threaded apps, like the previous poster mentions, take into account Turbo mode.

This surely goes for the desktop Nehalem cpus, but I am hearing that the laptop Nehalem cpus are whole different story. Both W510 and T510 come with (2 or?) 4 memory slots, meaning the architecture is not triple channel, hence I have some doubts regarding the performance increase in Nehalem mobile cpus too. It would be nice if someone could shed some light on this.

Again from "thabook" one can read that W510 has nVidia Quadro FX880M (with 1 GB video memory as mentioned by the previous poster). According to some folks this graphics card "corresponds" to the 9700M GT. I don´t know if that is true, but if we for a moment suppose that it is close to the truth, then it is quite stronger than its predecessor in W500, but still a little bit under FX2700M and quite far from FX3700M in W700.