 In Tom’s Hardware Guide’s review early last week of a Core Duo-based notebook with Intel’s 945 PM chipset and ATI’s dedicated X1600 GPU, our test engineers reported stumbling across a mysterious power consumption issue. The unit tested showed abnormally high power consumption, which at first, they believed could be attributable to the Core Duo processor itself, with the high-performance graphics system being an alternate candidate.
But engineers with whom we consulted later in the week indicated that the issue may lie with the chipset of Intel’s new dual-core platform, which previously was code-named “Napa”. This particular issue has prevented their systems from achieving the goal of four to five hours of battery life which Intel had led them to expect.
 After a series of extensive tests involving battery benchmarks, Tom’s Hardware Guide’s Munich Labs engineers were able to observe the precise power consumption problem involving the Core Duo 945 GM chipset.
Our assessment and observations, coupled with extensive consultation with engineers familiar with Intel dual-core architecture, plus information we received today from Microsoft, have led us to conclude that an anomaly in the way the currently available version of the ICH7-M Southbridge communicates with Microsoft’s ACPI driver, is at the heart of the power drain issue.
The delicate issue about this bug, provided to Microsoft partners under confidentiality guidelines as Knowledge Base article KB899179, is the fact that it has been known to be a “problem” at least since 12 July 2005. It is unclear at this time why Microsoft has not issued a patch or an advisory the public to fix or explain this bug. So far, Microsoft has not responded to our inquiries and we are still waiting for a comment on this power drain issue.
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