The total power (in watt hours) required to perform an entire SYSmark 2007 run decreases by 5.2% from 106 to 100.5 Wh. While this doesn't look like much we should not forget that Penryn does not only require less total power to finish the workload, but it also delivers better performance.

SYSmark 2007 Score Per Watt hour

This is probably one of the most interesting results, as it relates to performance and power requirements. The chart shows the SYSmark 2007 Preview score divided by the total amount of power (in Wh) required to run the workload. We expected the 45 nm E8400 to be considerably better than the 65 nm E6750, but we did not quite expect it to outperform the Core 2 Extreme QC9650 quad-core processor, which is based on two Wolfdale dies inside the physical processor (Intel calls this Yorkfield). In other words, while the quad core does provide more performance for thread-optimized workloads, the power requirements increase more than the performance benefits.