13. Which One Has Lasting Power?

In addition to the performance issue, another important aspect of a notebook processor is, of course, is how efficiently the battery uses power. In order to test the Dothan's claims of high power efficiency, we ran the following tests:

In order to simulate the CPU load in an everyday office environment, we used Mobilemark. In a second test, we simulated the worst-case scenario in which there's a continual, maximum load on the CPU. Here we used the four integrated game demos in 3D Mark 2001SE, letting them run in an infinite loop until the battery ran out of juice.

As shown by these realistic, application-related tests, the differences in battery life remain within the bounds of variation in repeated measurements. The top-of-the-line Dothan model is therefore faster than the fastest of the Banias models, but is not more wasteful with power than its predecessor.