An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
Intel has been known to have roadmapped its first quad-core mobile processor for a Q3 release - it demo'd the beast back in October 2007 - but now precise product details have emerged.
The gaming-oriented Core 2 Extreme QX9300 is - surprise, surprise -a 45nm 'Penryn' processor, so it contains plenty of L2 cache: 12MB tobe precise, split 50:50 between each pair of cores. The chip will runat 2.53GHz on top of a 1066MHz frontside bus.
According to a reporton Chinese-language site HKEPC, the QX9300 will have a powerconsumption envelope of 45W - 10W more than mainstream mobile Core 2Duos' 35W TDP.
That means the CPU won't necessarily fit straight into existingnotebook designs - the tolerances of a system designed tightly for a35W processor are unlikely to extend to a 45W chip. Which is one reasonwhy the QX9300 won't be part of Q2's Centrino update, 'Montevina' - or Centrino 2, as we should now start calling it.
It won't come cheap - as Core 2 Extreme CPUs never do. HKEPC'ssources reckon the QX9300 alone will cost laptop makers $1038 a popwhen they buy it in batches of 1000 chips.
Intel kicked off its Developer Forum this morning by discussing its upcoming 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo mobile processors. Based on the Penrynarchitecture due late this year, the smaller manufacturing processallows for processors that run cooler, faster, and for longer thantoday's 65nm chips. The design will also bring SSE4 vector extensionsfor better media performance as well as improved power-savingtechnology. Despite the collection of advancements, however, Microsoftsays the technology is in such an advanced state that its dual-coreversion of the chip was demonstrated today in a working notebook.
"The product is pretty healthy," said Intel's mobile product manager Mooly Eden.
Quote:
While exact clock speeds weren't revealed, the semiconductor makerindicates that the future processor will be a drop-in replacement forthe 65nm Santa Rosa processors and platform to be released next month.The imminent release runs on a faster 800MHz bus and allows for suchfeatures as Dynamic Acceleration, which can deliberately overclock onecore when another is shut down and improve performance forsingle-threaded programs. It will include some of the first mobileprocessors to unlocked for overclocking by experienced gamers.
Intel also used its conference to reveal early details about aquad-core version of its mobile Penryn chip, which should become thefirst of its kind in the industry. The new processor will be targetedat the highest-end market of desktop replacement gaming and workstationnotebooks where battery life is a secondary concern. While the CPU islikely to be a 'true' quad-core system which doesn't simply merge twodual-core designs and would thus be faster than today's Xeon 5300 andCore 2 Quad models, the company doesn't expect widespread useimmediately after the quad Penryn's debut in 2008.
"You'll see it at the high-end," said Eden. "But I don't see it runningso fast into the mainstream because I don't believe there will beenough threaded applications that will justify the tradeoffs."
Specific enhancements to the four-core version are unknown and willlikely depend on particular notebook case designs and coolingtechniques, the company notes.
Digg Topic
Tag topic on On del.icio.us
Technorati Search
Post to Slashdot
