14 DAY TRIAL // With the Sandy Bridge series of CPUs on the way, it is not exactly surprising to hear of new rumors or details leaking to the web, and it seems that one of the more recent ones is quite promising, at least as far as energy efficiency goes.
As consumers may or may not know by now, the Sandy Bridge series of CPUs should come out at CES 2011, in January.
This line of chips is the next-generation platform for desktops and mobile PCs and will cover a wide variety of clock speeds and power consumption ratings.
More recently, Fudzilla claims to have stumbled upon one of the more relevant details of the desktop-oriented collection of CPUs.
Apparently, the lowest, at least currently known, TDP (thermal design power) that these processors will manage to achieve is 35W.
Granted, notebook-aimed CPUs can go even lower, but 35W is a significant achievement as far as the desktop segment is concerned.
The CPU supposedly known to have managed this low TDP is the Core i3 2100T, T being the indicator for Power Optimized Lifestyle (no mention as to why the letter T was chosen to denote this status).
It is a dual-core chip with four threads, a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz and 3 MB of cache, as well as support for dual-channel DDR3 at 1,066 MHz or 1,333 MHz.
Furthermore, being a Sandy bridge product, it features its own integrated graphics, one with a clock speed of 650 MHz.
It should be noted that when Turbo mode is activated, this built-in graphics jumps to 1,100 MHz.
The product is, of course, compatible with the LGA 1155 chipset and may prove quite appealing in the making of HTPCs and AiO (All-in-One) systems, since these two types of desktop computers are the ones that most value a low power draw.