Intel cooks up nine Montevina-class mobile chips

While the delay in Centrino 2’s debut will set back the arrival of notebooks running the complete Centrino mix of processor, graphics chipset and wireless radio, the processors themselves remain slated to launch on July 14. Not all vendors built their notebooks around Intel’s silicon superset, especially higher-end machines running discrete graphics, and many offer customers a choice of components such as third-party WiFi modules. So what’s in the pipeline?

We’ll see nine iterations of the second-gen 45nm Penryn-class processors, making this the biggest single rollout of mobile processors in Intel’s history. They’ll all sport a 1,066MHz front side bus, compared to the current 800MHz FSB.

Sitting at the top of the pile is the new quad-core extreme performance or QX series. The flagship QX9300 will be equipped with 12MB of cache and is expected to touch down at 3GHz, although how much higher customers will take this overlock-friendly processor remains to be seen. Both the QX quad-core and X dual-core Extreme models (the X9100 will also be 3GHz) could see thermals sizzle up to 40 watts, so using either a laptop on your lap for several hours is not recommended.

The mid-range sees a continuation of the current T series (30-39 watt overhead, 2.53GHz and 2.8GHz) and the introduction of a new ‘optimal power / high performance’ P series (at 20-30 watts, from 2.4GHz to 2.53GHz), with a mixture of 6MB and 3MB cache. With the low-voltage L series (12-20 watts) and ultra-low voltage U series (less than 12 watts) the focus swings back to extreme energy efficiency for longer battery life.

But the real surprise (and for our money, the most welcome one) is the introduction of three ‘small package processors’. These are a continuation of Intel’s work on the first small form factor (SFF-class) ‘Sana Ynez’ processors that found their way into the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300 as 60% downscaled derivatives of the 65nm Merom LV line.

The SP (20-30 watts), SL (12-20 watts) and SU (under 12 watts) lines will have a footprint of a mere 22mm compared to 35mm for the standard Penryn package. They’re proof that Intel sees serious potential in the slim sub-note segment typified by the Air and X300, which are way beyond what was ever imagined for the first ‘thin and light’ notebooks that the original Centrino platform ushered in just over five years ago.

This means that a mid-life refresh for the MacBook Air is almost certainly on the cards, and it underscores Lenovo’s expansion of the X-series ThinkPad family to 12in, 14.1in and 15.4in models.