Dadi Perlmutter, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Mobility Group, announced that Intel has launched its first mobile quad-core processors based on the company’s 45nm Penryn architecture during his keynote.
The first processors will be the Core 2 Extreme QX9300 and Core 2 Quad Q9100 and will come clocked at 2.53GHz and 2.26GHz respectively. Both feature a 1,066MHz front side bus and 12MB of L2 cache.
TDPs haven’t been discussed openly, but we’ve heard whispers in the region of 55W – one thing’s for sure, you won’t be seeing these processors in anything but desktop replacements.
We’ve seen a couple of machines with mobile quad-core processors dotted around the Moscone, but none seem to be using processors clocked at the launch speeds. One was an Asus model with a 15.1in form factor, which looks like it’ll fit under the Republic of Gamers brand.
The other was a 17in ODM model from Flextronics, which featured a mobile Core 2 Quad processor rated at 2.4GHz, but running at almost 3.0GHz. In addition, the machine also included a pair of Mobility Radeon HD 3870s in CrossFire for good measure.
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Opinion on gaming notebooks in general is divided, but these two machines look like they might satisfy that niche of performance-craving mobile gamers and multimedia enthusiasts. I’m not entirely convinced by this whole overclocked gaming notebook market though – overclocking notebooks just doesn’t seem right.
That concern was amplified when I saw a mobile dual-core desktop replacement notebook running at an impressive 4.0GHz. In order to reach these speeds though, the notebook had to be cooled by a thermoelectrically chilled notebook cooler. Without that, you’d be limited to a 3.5GHz clock speed "before things get a little unstable," said one Intel representative.
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Moving back to the quad-core processors being announced though, I see them having a bigger impact in the mobile workstation market – a market where overclocking isn’t even a consideration. We look forward to having a look at some of the notebooks once they’re available – they won’t be the first though, because Kobalt has already shoehorned a desktop quad-core processor into a ‘notebook’ with the Comanche SLI.
What do you think about quad-core making a move into the notebook arena? Discuss in the forums.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Intel announces mobile quad-core processors
Posted by Engeneer Moris at 1:49 PM
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