David Flynn05 January 2010, 5:04 AM
Notebooks sporting Intel’s first 32nm chips will go on sale from January 17th, with processors ranging from basic Core i3 to powerhouse Core i7.
Anyone looking for proof that the mobile tail is wagging the once-dominant desktop dog need look no further than Intel’s launch list for its new 32nm Westmere-class processors.
The roster sports almost twice as many notebook chips as desktops, with entries from all three of Intel’s good better-best processors – the Core i3, i5 and i7.
Each is a dual-core processor and also sports integrated Intel HD graphics mounted in the same silicon die as a separate graphics core. This, along with some other renovations as part of what Intel calls its ‘Nehalem repartitioning’, turns Westmere into a two-chip solution which reduces the size of the overall package by 30%.
The Core i5 and Core i7 mobile chips also support Intel’s ‘Turbo Boost’ to raise the CPU clock frequency from its nominal rating to several steps higher for short but intensive bursts of work. The fastest of the bunch, the Core i7-620M, starts at 2.66GHz and redlines at 3.33GHz.
All of the mobile processors, even the Core i3, also support the extension of this same turbo technology to the graphics core.
Applications or even OS operations which demand a heavy graphics kick can throttle back the CPU in order to temporarily bump up the frequency of the graphics core.
Given that most graphics-intensive apps also tend to be data-intensive, this is likely to be of most benefit to casual users who don’t regularly run extended sessions of high-end graphics.
And as the integrated graphics can co-exist with a discrete mobile graphics card, permitting users to hot-switch between them, it’s more likely to be a handy backstop measure for many road warriors.
Allied to the new mobile processors is Intel’s rebadged wireless chips, which now bear the Centrino brand and promise to do their bit for extending battery life by reducing wireless power when an Internet connection is present but not being actively used.
Reflecting the predicted growth in thin and light notebooks, three of the eleven new chips are rated as ultra-low voltage (or UM) processors.
Significantly, these belong to the Core i5 and Core i7 lines and will be positioned as the powerplant for a new category of ‘performance ultra-thin’ notebooks.
A UM edition of the Core i3 has yet to appear on Intel’s roadmap, so the processor suggested for everyday or ‘transactional’ ultra-thin notebooks remains as part of the Core 2 Duo series.