Intel unveils Core i7 laptop processors

 

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Posted on 24 Sep 2009 at 21:34

Intel's Dadi Perlmutter, head of the Intel Architecture Group, used his keynote at IDF to talk about the new Core i7 Mobile processors.

He unveiled three new Core i7 quad-core processors for laptops based on the Clarksfield design, which is effectively a mobile version of Lynnfield. Perlmutter then invited Mooly Eden, head of Intel's PC client group, onto stage to discuss some of the processors' details.

Like Lynnfield, Clarksfield features a dual-channel memory controller, supporting speeds up to DDR3-1333, 16 PCI-Express lanes, a single chip chipset (in this case, the PM55 Express) and an impressive Turbo Boost mode. There are differences between Clarksfield and Lynnfield though - the biggest being the lower power consumption and there's also the slightly smaller 989-pin socket.

The new flagship laptop chip is the Core i7-920XM, which has a base clock speed of 2.0GHz, but turbos up to 3.2GHz depending on the workload. It features 8MB of L3 cache in addition to the 256KB of L2 per core and has a TDP of 55W. It'll cost $1,054 per chip in 1,000 unit quantities.

Below that, there's the Core i7-820QM and the Core i7-720QM. These run at respective base clock speeds of 1.73GHz and 1.60GHz and turbo to up to 3.06GHz and 2.80GHz respectively. The Core i7-820QM features the same 8MB L3 cache as the i7-920XM, while the i7-720QM's L3 cache has had 2MB lopped off it. Both chips have a 45W TDP, so they're not going to make their way into super-slim notebooks for quite some time, but the designs we've seen so far don't look too bad.

All three chips have Hyper Threading enabled and the way the new Core i7 Mobile chips handle power management in lightly threaded applications is particularly impressive. Eden said that this new power saving technology really does contribute to the awesome Turbo Boost speed ups. He explained that when a core isn't being used, it is disconnected from the power bus, meaning that the idle core effectively consumes no power.

That power is used to massively increase the frequencies on the remaining cores to improve performance. The reason the improvements are much more significant appears to relate to the thermal design power. For example, we were told that the next-generation six-core Gulftown processor will have a similar Turbo Boost improvement to current LGA1366 Core i7 desktop chips and not Lynnfield. That's because Gulftown will be a 130W chip and so the wiggle room isn't quite as high as on lower-TDP chips.

There will be new laptop designs sporting Core i7 Mobile processors coming from the usual suspects, such as Asus, Dell, HP and Toshiba, who Intel says have shipping products today.

Author: Tim Smalley in San Francisco