RE: Zebo
Okay, I am SURE going from 62W(130nm) TDP to 31W(90nm) average is really a big enhancement since TDP would be higher than the 31W figure. And considering Low-voltage AthlonXPs with 25W TDP still had lower battery life than Centrinos, man a LV AthlonXP 2000+ mobile laptop with 43Wh battery gets(link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20040610/averatec-04.html#battery_test_mobilemark_2002) 131 min while Centrino 1.7GHz with 23.6Wh gets 123 min, plus the Centrino setup uses 60GB hard drive with 8MB cache while AthlonXP setup uses 40GB hard drive with 2MB cache. So with equivalent battery Centrino setup will get 224 min or 71% more battery life or 1 hours and 33 minutes more. So even the 90nm MOBILE Athlon64 is no competition against Centrino-based laptops, at least for battery life, and I think 5% extra frames per second in games will not give A64 more than bragging rights. And now there is Dothan with 5W TDP on the ULV at 1.2GHz compared to Banias which had 7W TDP at 1.0GHz.
From Dothan Review:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2129&p=7
Intel Pentium M(Dothan) 2.0GHz vs. Athlon64 3000+
Business Winstone 2004: 2.8% advantage for Pentium M
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004: 0.7% advantage for Athlon64
Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2004: 7.05% advantage for Pentium M, and sure 3.2GHz P4 is the highest but the P4 also beats A64
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004: 13.6% advantage for Pentium M
SYSMark 2004: 10.3% advantage for Pentium M
DivX Encoding(AutoGK+DivX 5.1.1): 5.2% advantage for Athlon64
XviD Encoding(AutoGK+XvID 5.1.1): 4.98% advantage for Athlon64
Unreal Tournament 2004-UT Bench: 6.9% advantage for Pentium M
Halo Timedemo: 3.5% advantage for Athlon64
Final Fantasy XI Bench: 4.0% advantage for Athlon64
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory Radar Demo: 1.0% advantage for Athlon64
Warcraft III The Frozen Throne: 0.7% advantage for Athlon64
Visual Studio 6.0 Compiling Quake 3 Source: Both perform identically
3dsmax R5 - Singlepipe2.max: 9.5% less time for Athlon64
Lightwave 7.5 - Radiosity_Reflective_Things: 19.5% less time for Athlon64
Overall win: Athlon64, but I don't think most of us would notice less than 4%(and the fact that Athlon64s are made for gaming, even more amazing the performance of Pentium M) performance increase and for general apps Pentium M is faster anyway, but Pentium M or any Centrino based probably has 40-50% better battery life, or around 1-1.5 hours more, which may not be useful to you since you may be a gamer but for other people that DO carry around their laptops other than inside their OWN house its very good.
RE: AnnoyedGrunt
It IS useful for people who has laptops and don't want to burn their lap, or want to have a quiet system, or a smaller form factor. Imagine what the ULV versions do. Probably they would be able to run heatsink and fan less at 1.2GHz.