David Flynn05 January 2010, 5:00 AM
Microsoft may have abandoned year-based versioning for Windows but Intel has picked up the baton to unveil its “all-new 2010 Intel Core processor family”.
In what Intel hopes will become an annual fixture in its ‘tick-tock’ model, the chip colossus today launches what it calls its “2010 Intel Core processor family”.
And it’s a pretty staggering effort which could be hard to top when 2011 rolls around.
There’s 17 new dual-core desktop and notebook processors based on the Core branding, and 20 if you count the new Pentium and Celeron dual-core chips; the launch of Intel’s 32nm-based Westmere technology with an integrated on-die Intel HD Graphics core; the debut of the entry-level Core i3 processor to complete Intel’s ‘good, better, best’ triple play; plus the 2010 Calpella notebook platform with new Centrino-branded wireless chips for improved throughput and a power-saving ‘online idle’ mode.
The concept of a single mother-of-all-launches is new for Intel, which has traditionally taken a staged approach to rolling out new processors.
In previous years we’ve seen a new microarchitecture or the ‘shrink’ of that design into a slightly smaller footprint – the tick and the tock, in Intel parlance – accompanied by the first chips baked to that blueprint, which have usually been high-end processors. Chips for the mainstream desktop market, and their mobile counterparts, have followed months later.
In contrast, today’s launch spans from the Core i7 to the Core i3 and includes desktops and laptops alike.
It’s also the first time that a new processor design has launched straight into the mainstream market. “It’s very unusual for us to do this” agrees Philip Cronin, General Manager of Intel Australia & New Zealand.
“We tend to start at the higher end, and I think the big advantage is that we can take cutting-edge 32nm technology and make immediately available to everyone. From an architectural change, we’ve done nine of them in the 40 years and this is one of the most significant, because all the products in (our Core range) are readily available.”
This is doubly impressive because the Westmere design isn’t just a shrink of Nehalem microarchitecture from 45nm to 32nm. Westmere introduces a revolutionary change in Intel’s platform architecture – it’s a two-chip package where the graphics and memory controller move onto the same silicon die as the processor, while the chipset inherits some of the functions of the former southbridge hub.
Despite today’s silicon tsunami, however, Intel still has a few chips up its sleeve for later in the year.
A Westmere-based six-core 3.33GHz
Core i7-980X Extreme Edition is due sometime before March, when it will supplant the current 45nm quad-core i7-975 Extreme Edition as Intel’s most souped-up superslab.
By mid-year Intel will also release a Core i3 mobile processor for the mainstream ‘ultra-thin’ market to complement today’s launch of the Core i5 and Core i7 ‘UM’ (ultra-mobile) variants for what it tags as the ‘performance ultra-thin’ market.