Sonoma on power: two steps forward, one step back

Not that it should come as much of a surprise to anyone keeping a close eye on Intel's newly-released Centrino/Sonoma-based mobile platform, but despite their greater efforts to shrink power consumption to the usual bare minimum, at least one Intel rep has said power consumption may actually go up. Why, you may ask? Well, speed increases always come at a cost—though the beefed up Sonoma chipset's clock was cut in half, the Pentium M CPU line hasn't undergone any radical power-munching changes, which mean faster speeds will still gobble up more juice. Also throw in PCI-Express, DDR2 SDRAM, faster graphics chipsets, and an 802.11a radio in Intel's new 2915 WiFi adapter, and you've got some small, incremental power increases that may make Sonoma use a slight bit more juice than expected. Bottom line, are we going to upgrade to Sonoma laptops anyway? Bet your pants we are.