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Shrinking the chips still does mean improved performance per unit of power. This means lower battery consumption and smaller cooling requirements. Although smal
by exDM69 11y ago
Shrinking the chips still does mean improved performance per unit of power. This means lower battery consumption and smaller cooling requirements. Although smaller transistors have relatively higher leakage current, which needs to be managed somehow (usually by race-to-sleep in software).
A five year old laptop may still be up to the task today. But you won't find a five year old, fanless laptop with hours of active battery life. The new Skylake Core-M based fanless laptops are fantastic, and that's made possible by smaller transistors and improved semiconductor process.
This is as much relevant for server/supercomputer installations where cooling and power consumption are important.
- simoncion 11y ago> ...you won't find a five year old, fanless laptop with hours of active battery life. My Toughbook CF-30 Mk1 is ~eight years old, fanless, and -when equipped with a new battery- gets between six and eight hours of active, heavy use on a charge. :) Other than the fact that it uses a 32-bit CPU (the Mk2 variant uses a 64-bit CPU), it's still quite a nice laptop.
- exDM69 11y agoThe Toughbook looks like a really cool laptop, but at 3.6 kg of weight, you can't really compare it to an 1.3 kg Skylake laptop. There's plenty of heat sink in that big metal chassis.
- simoncion 11y agoIt is -however- a >5 year old, fanless laptop with many, many hours of battery life. :) It's also substantially more durable than the vast majority of laptops out there, due in large part to its chunky construction. It's a pity that Panasonic failed to choose the low voltage variants of the CPU in the CF-31 (and -thus- had to add a fan into the machine). It's awfully nice to have a laptop with no non-hinge moving parts to wear out.
- SixSigma 11y agoIf it was built today, then, it would have 24 hours of battery life.