Mobile Core i7 920XM, Clarksfield: Nehalem on-the-go

Clarksfield Summary

The following three slides summarize what you get with Clarksfield: basically a mobile version of Lynnfield and P55.

The bottom line is that Clarksfield is all about performance. Nehalem can be very stingy when it comes to power use, but as we will see later maximum power draw can still be very high. If you're looking for a new laptop that will get Intel Atom levels of battery life, Clarksfield definitely isn't going to fit the bill. What it should offer is better performance within the same power envelope as previous processors, so instead of a QX9300 you can get an i7-920XM.

One final slide from Intel that I had to pull out shows that marketing as usual is getting a little carried away. I suppose the real question is what qualifies as a "gaming laptop", but as someone who regularly reviews high-end laptops I'm relatively certain they're not getting any closer to displacing gaming desktops for the vast majority of users. When you can purchase a $1000 desktop that offers 2-3x the performance of even the fastest $3000+ "gaming laptops", that's a tough pill to swallow. Needless to say, just because a laptop has "DirectX 10 capable" graphics doesn't mean it's a "gaming laptop". I would argue that anything less than the GeForce 8800M/9800M/GTX 260M hardly qualifies as a gaming solution, but then some people are more than happy to make do with AMD's HD 3200.

Okay, enough talk… let's see some actual performance numbers.