Core 2 Duo Laptop CPUs: No Big Boost, But 64-Bit Ready

Laptops got only a small performance boost and battery life improvement from the use of the new Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile (code-named Merom) processors, the PCWorld.ca reports.

The magazine tested three Core 2 Duo based notebooks: a Dell XPS M1210, a Gateway M685-E and HP Pavilion dv6000t.

“The biggest performance increase over laptops with same-speed Core Duo CPUs was 7 percent. Enough to shave a few seconds off day-to-day business operations, but nothing more”, the report says.

Also, Mac World earlier reported 10 percent improvement when comparing MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo to its comparable Core Duo counterpart.

PCWorld.ca advised shoppers to “think long and hard before paying a premium for a Core 2 laptop”.

On the other hand, since the older Intel Core Duo (Yonah) is 32-bit only, the 64-bit Core 2 Duo or some of the AMD 64-powered laptops might be good investment if you want to run some of the 64-bit OSs.

The Core 2 Duo laptop owners could see better computer performance results when the 64-bit Windows Vista OS arrive in January next year. The Beta 64-bit versions of Vista, as same as Windows XP x64 and 64-bit Linux operating systems, showed better performance results than their 32-bit counterparts. The benchmarked 64-bit software and operating systems in the last few years were better especially in compressing and decompressing data, such as audio and video files or images.