Intel announces that it’ll announce new processors

8:02 am January 7th

CHARLIE IS GOING to have an early start on the first day of CES, at least if he’s planning on attending Intel’s press briefing for its new Core processors that currently go under the code names of Clarkdale and Arrandale. Intel has posted its CES plans and it looks the most anticipated part is set to start at 8:02 am, which seems a little bit early, at least for most of the journalists we know in the business.

Never mind the time of the day, the important things are the products that Intel is getting ready to launch. Clarkdale and Arrandale are Intel’s first CPU’s with the IGP inside the CPU packaging, with the former being for desktop systems and the latter for notebooks. Both models feature Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology, but this time we’ll also see it applied to the GPU. This means that there will be something of a trade-off between CPU and graphics performance and it’ll be interesting to find out how Intel is intending to balance this.

Turbo Boost allows the CPU to overclock by disabling one or more cores, but in the case of the graphics we’re not sure how it’ll work in detail, as it all comes down to thermals. So if the CPU cores are running flat out, it’s possible that the GPU will be throttled back to prevent especially notebooks from running too hot. On the other hand, even in games it’s rare that the CPU is running at 100 percent capacity at all times, but it might mean that graphics performance will be a bit erratic at times.

Most of the desktop parts will have the GPU clocked at 733MHz with the exception of the Core i5 661 which will get a faster 900MHz GPU while the Pentium G6950 is expected to have a slower GPU at 533MHz. The mobile processors are a bit more complicated, as the thermals are much more constrained.  The entry level Core i3 processors should have the GPU running at 667MHz and these CPU’s won’t feature Turbo Boost, although it’s unclear if the GPU will be capable of overclocking.

The mobile Core i5 will come in two flavours, UM and M, where the UM models will have a slower 500MHz GPU while the M models will have a faster GPU at 766MHz. The UM models will be power frugal at 18W, while the M models will have a TDP of 35W. The Core i7 processors will use the same GPU speeds for the equivalent UM and M model CPUs, but will add a third LM model SKU with a TDP of 25W. The LM Core i7 model should have a base GPU clock of 566MHz.

However, Intel is going to be showing a lot more than new processors as the keynote speech will include netbooks, MID’s, 3D , HD and a whole bunch of other interesting things, at least if you’re into technology like we are. There’s nothing that really stands out on the program and most of the things have been in the pipeline for some time. However, Intel is also planning a few other events including ‘How to define Internet TV’, the complexity of ‘Smartphone OS ecosystems’ and a ‘Hot or not of emerging technology’. Is it just us or is Intel trying to make technology sound attractive?S|A

The following two tabs change content below.