David Flynn16 July 2007, 3:30 PM
The new Core 2 Extreme X7800 mobile processor is not only overclock-ready, it's officially an arse-kicking Core 2 Duo on steroids according to Intel's mobile guru Mooly Eden.
Earlier this year, at Intel's IDF techfest in Beijing, Mooly Eden (the General Manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, but better known as father of the Centrino) declared that 2007 would be "the year of mobile gaming". To make it so, Eden promised "in the second half of this year, we will deliver an unlocked Merom" (Merom is Intel's codename for the current mobile Core 2 Duo line).
Intel didn't wait long for the calendar to tick over. With the year barely halfway gone, the company today announced the first ‘Extreme edition' mobile CPU. The Core 2 Extreme X7800 sprints to the front of the mobile processor field with a 2.6GHz dual-core engine, 4MB of L2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus.
 Extreme mobile gaming: optimised for kicking aline butt |
What's more notable, however, is that Intel has unlocked the chip by removing the ‘overspeed protection' that keeps the CPU limited to its native clock speed. Manufacturers and users alike will be free to tweak or turbo-charge notebooks built around the X7800. "OEMs wanted this, they came to us" Eden told apcmag.com during a post-IDF briefing, also describing the forthcoming CPU as having "arse-kicking" performance and likening it to a "Core 2 Duo on steroids". However, he cautioned that a fire-breathing CPU like this would be only for those "who know how to cool it".
Even without users pushing past the chip's silicon speed limits, the X7800 sports the Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration technology common to the rest of the Santa Rosa family. This enables a single core in the chip to exceed the nominal clock rating of the dual-core superslab while running single-threaded applications, which includes most games.
With one core in a low-power or idle state the other core can be throttled above its nominal clock speed, yet the CPU remains inside its specified thermal envelope - which in turn keeps the heat and power consumption within safe limits. "It's not the same as overclocking" Eden stresses. "We are keeping within the same spec as the two cores."
So no matter whether you keep the X7800 street legal or dive under the hood and nudge it a bit closer to the 3GHz mark (although how close you can get remains to be seen!), Intel is hoping the chip will unleash a new range of gaming notebooks. Just start saving: the processor will sell to manufacturers at US$851, or A$975.
And the march of the mega-mobile CPUs doesn't stop there. During the same briefing, Eden said that a quad-core mobile processor was also on the way. No timeframe was mentioned, and Eden admitted that "I don't believe we'll drag it very fast into the mainstream, but we are definitely going to do it.'