Intel Officially Debuts the Core i7 for Notebooks

Santa Clara, California-based Intel, the world's leading processor vendor, has just officially announced the debut of one of its most anticipated products this year, the new line of Core i7 Mobile processors. Available in both regular and extreme editions, the chips have already been selected to power some of the latest high-end portable gaming systems, including new models from Alienware, Toshiba and ASUS. Built on the latest Intel PM55 express chipset, the new line of Intel Core i7 processors has been designed to provide consumers with a choice for Intel's Nehalem architecture, inside a portable PC form factor.

 

“With intelligent features like Intel Turbo Boost Technology, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology and a host of others, Intel has revolutionized the laptop PC processor, delivering performance when you need it, energy efficiency when you don’t,” said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group. “For the first time, mobile users can choose a laptop that delivers Internet-server like speed, right in their laps for the most demanding tasks, from intense gaming to digital video editing and social media applications.”

 

Formerly codenamed 'Calpella', Intel's new platform for the portable PC segment has been designed to become available as the company's new PM55 Express chipset and offers a single chip architecture that supports up to six SATA 3Gs/port, eight PCI Express 2.0 x 1 and up to fourteen USB 2.0 ports. Taking advantage of the chip maker's Matrix Storage Technology 8.9, the new platform also enables storage data protection, power management and enhanced system performance.

 

Intel's new mobile processor lineup includes the following processor models, part of both standard and Extreme Edition series:

 

Core i7-720QM: 1.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache (256KB per core), 6MB unified L3 core

Core i7-820QM: 1.73GHz, 1MB L2 cache (256KB per core), 8MB unified L3 core

Core i7-920XM: 2.00GHz, 1MB L2 cache (256KB per core), 8MB unified L3 core

 

The new 'Clarksfield' processors are designed to enable support for 1333MHz DDR3 memory in dual-channel with full PCI Express 2.0 x16 or dual x8 graphics support. While factory clock speeds are lower than most of the chip maker's previous line of high-end mobile processors, these new models have been featured with Intel's Turbo Boost technology, which is designed to boost up the processor's speed by up 75 percent, according to Intel.

As far as pricing goes, these new CPUs will be available in the upcoming months to OEMs for US$364, US$546 and US$1,054, respectively.