14 DAY TRIAL // When Intel launched its first dual-core Sandy Bridge processors in February of this year the company also released a series of ULV mobile chips. Now, the Santa Clara giant is seeking to expand this range with three new Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs that will feature improved clock speeds.
All the chips feature a 17W TDP and come inside a smaller BGA package which enables notebook makers to save space when designing ultra-compact laptop models.
Making our way from top to bottom, the fastest mobile ULV chip that Intel plans to release is going to be called the Core i7-2677M and it features a 1.7GHz base clock, which can go all the way up to 2.9GHz thanks to the Turbo Boost technology.
Mush like its predecessor, this will also use the HD 3000 integrated graphics core, which has a base clock of 350MHz, but Intel has this time increased the maximum GPU turbo speed to 1.2GHz, 200MHz higher than that of the current Core i7-2657M.
Next in line is the slightly slower Core i7-2637M that features pretty much the same specifications, but it comes with a 1.7GHz base frequency which can be increased to a maximum 2.8GHz in Turbo Boost mode.
Both Core i7 chips feature 4MB of Level 3 cache memory, Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost support as well as Intel's vPro technology, to name just a few of their capabilities.
Moving to the third core i5 processor, the 2557M, this also features two processing cores that are clocked at 1.7GHz and a 2.8GHz maximum turbo speed, but it comes with only 3MB of Level 3 cache.
No details regarding the release date of the chips, or their prices, are available at this point in time.
For comparison, the fastest Sandy Bridge ULV processor for notebook computers in the market is the Core i7-2657M which comes clocked at 1.6 GHz.