Intel brings 45nm chips to laptops

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins in Las Vegas

Posted on 8 Jan 2008 at 22:32

Intel is bringing its 45nm Penryn processors to Centrino laptops for the first time, the company has announced at CES 2008.

Click here for our full coverage from CES 2008

The company has launched five new mobile Penryn processors, although the high-end Extreme Edition chip won't arrive until later this year. The other four should start appearing in laptops by the end of this month.

The new chips will give laptops an immediate performance boost, without adding to the processor's power drain, according to Intel. "You'll see a modest 5-12% improvement in performance," Karen Regis, marketing manager for mobile products at Intel told PC Pro. "We're just at the beginning at the ramp of Penryn."

Regis claims the 47 new SSE4 instructions will significantly improve performance in graphics intensive applications. "These applications will benefit from a 20, 30 or 40% performance improvement," she claims.

Video encoding and 3D graphics remain one of the main reasons why people opt for desktop processing power, rather than a laptop. But Intel claims it's not worried about eating into its desktop market. "We don't see extreme gamers giving up their desktops," says Regis. "Lots of gamers will have a laptop they take to LAN parties, but we don't think we're cannibalising the desktop market."

The Santa Rosa refresh also sees the introduction of a new sleep state, called C6. Intel decided C6 sounded too much like "sea sick", so it's decided to rename it Deep Power Down State. This new state completely powers down the the Level 2 cache, so that the sleep mode consumes 95% less power than the laptop would do whilst remaining on idle.

Click here for our full coverage from CES 2008