Continuing in my quest for an ultra portable yet powerful machine for dragon, I've picked up an hp elitebook 2560p. Apparently people are having success replacing the stock cpu with quad core i7's. I was able to find a 2720qm with 8mb cache and a 2670qm with 8m cache on ebay. Both are engineering samples, hence the added cache.  The consensus here seems to be that cache and memory speed matter more than mhz. So if I install one of those quad core processors with 1866mhz ram, can I either undervolt or downclock my cpu so as to not 1) drain my battery way too fast and 2) keep temperatures down in my 12.5" notebook?

How much would it affect performance if I used a power plan that limits the mac cpu to 80% or even less? I've heard of some people forcing mobile processors to 100% even on battery. Does that make a big difference? Or will the 8mb cache allow for sufficient performance at a lower clock speed?

 Thanks for considering. I've been on a quest to find a lightweight laptop for diction for a while now and a 2560p with a quad core seems to be the best bet. Sadly it looks like it will be a while before the i7-3612qm 35w chip becomes available in a 12" laptop. Even when it does it is expected to be very expensive, whereas my modded 2560p will only be about $700.

I can't speak for an "engineering sample" 2670QM processor revved up to 8 MB cache, but I do have a laptop with the normal one built into it. Running it under "High Performance" settings versus "Battery Saving" mode does make all the difference as far as Dragon's performance, probably reducing it to about 50%.

Considering that otherwise the difference between 6 MB and 8 MB cache typically results in about as much as 10% to 20% gain in performance - which I can verify by testing this machine against my desktop with an i7 2600 built into it,  by using them both at the same time competitively, dictating into identical devices, and programmatically computing the real-time-factors (processing duration divided by utterance duration) -, I would doubt that you will be happy when trying it like this.

Rüdiger

Well, it's past the point where we can make any changes in the code, but we can still make changes to the Easter Egg!

~

Rüdiger,

Do you also have benchmarks of AMD FX processors that come with more L3-cache than their Intel counterparts? I wonder whether the additional L3-cache despite the slower CPU speed would give AMD CPUs an advantage.

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