For the guitarists under us, you now have a good use for all those old plastic passes you never use and have too many off.

Hmmm interesting

A bit sad that ephotozine just reviewed the DA 18-250 while it's no longer in production for over a year... well better late then never.

You need to be looking at the i5 UM (ultra-mobile) not the M (mobile).
The UM are 18w TDP and that's total package so that includes the IGP and the memory controller that's inside it. This i5 560UM for example.
There are also i7 as UM with also 18w DTP.

Sadly there is no benchmark for the 560UM but there is for the 520UM link
And here is the C2D SL9400 link

As you can see the 520UM is roughly preforming the same but the C2D SL9400 cost $284 U.S. and the 520UM $241 U.S.
The faster clocked 560UM is also still only $250 U.S.
If you want to look at the same budget...
There is the i7 620UM for $278 U.S. link
That one is also still 18w tdp

I wonder if the update is processor base because they use the same processor in the K7 as in the K5 right so they should also be able to do it with the k7 maybe... i wonder what numbers you would get then.
Maybe the processor can keep up with 108MB/s meaning your SD-card would be the weakest link.
It's either to slow or it would run out off space... or the sensor over heats?

Thanks John

Lets do some calculations.

the image size of the K5 is 4928 x 3264 pixels so 16.084.992 pixels in total and those are 14bit deep so that is 225.189.888 bits = 214,757812 Mb (megabits) = 26,8447265 MB (megabytes)

And that x7 times each second (7fps) = 1503,30468 megabits or 187,913085 megabytes each second for the processor to handle

What does the fastest SD cards do?
The new SanDisk introduces Extreme III do 30MB/s no where near the throughput needed off 188MB/s
Add best a SD card buffer would extend the total images in the buffer with 1 but it would be unable to receive images that the processor has finished...
So the gain might even be a negative number


just to show the difference.
The K7 has 20,7451172 megabytes photos and it can "only" do 5.2fps so that's 108MB/s

There might also be some optimization involved most likely because they also improve the performance of the Codec for Win/mac but but no way optimization alone can account for 150% increase

I've remove that comment that they maybe use the SD-card as an buffer for that reason, you're talking about an unprocessed format straight from the sensor... what would that be 40MB or something like that if not more?
If so no way a SD-card can be used to increase the buffer

I've used it with some landscapes shot and macro, it isn't perfect i agree but you've at least an indication.

I'm curious how they're able to increase it so much though... maybe they have lower the compression so the CPU has less to do?
I doubt they have unlocked more RAM somehow because it would be silly they didn't do that from the start.

Ah yes but the 3 chip solution (i3/i5+GPU(320M)+PCH) use only 1 watt more than the 2 chip solution for the Core 2 Duo (CPU + 320M) while the i5 solution has more processing power.