14 DAY TRIAL // It's been quite a busy month for Intel, as the company has not only introduced a wide array of chips based on its Sandy Bridge architecture, but an important collection of processors built using the company's older CPU designs, like the recently introduced Core i5-480M and Core i3-390M.
Both of them are based on the Westmere architecture and are quite similar to each other as their operating frequency is set at 2.66GHz.
The number of processing cores is set at two, and up to four threads can be run simultaneously thanks to the company's Hyper-Threading technology that makes the OS believe a quad-core CPU is installed.
Each core has a dedicated 256 KB L2 cache and the chip packs a total of 3MB of L3 cache, and both feature virtualization and SSE4 support, an integrated memory controller, integrated graphics as well as an on-board PCI Express controller.
In addition, the Core i5 CPU also comes Turbo Boost enabled, so it can raise its frequency above the standard 2.66GHz, and allows for a slightly higher graphics turbo mode.
The processors are available in PGA (Socket G1) and BGA packages, so they can be installed in a wide range of mobile and low-power desktop systems.
According to CPU-World, the Core i5-480M is already available in various notebook models, its smaller brother making its appearance in laptops such as Dell XPS 14, XPS 15 and XPS 17 line, Hewlett Packard G42/G42t, and ProBook 4420s, to name just a few.
Together with these new Core-family CPUs, Intel also launched a Westmere based Pentium processor, the P6300.
This features the same 3MB of L3 cache, integrated graphics, memory and PCI Express on-board controllers, but has to make do without Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost, and Virtualization support, Intel also lowering the integrated graphics frequency.
As far as its clock rate is concerned, the Pentium P6300 runs at 2.27GHz.
These processors are only available to OEMs for now, so no pricing details were disclosed.