14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may have decided against releasing the Haswell CPU series during CES 2013, but that doesn't mean it is staying silent during the occasion. Indeed, the company has already unleashed three new CPUs.
One chip we have already written about: the Atom Z2420. Intel hopes it is both strong and energy-efficient enough to be adopted by smartphone makers.
We won't go into any details about it though, since we have already specified the relevant bits here.
That leaves us with the Core i Y-series units: Core i5-3439Y and Core i7-3689Y.
Intel envisioned the Y-series chips as low-power ultrabook platforms, which means they are good enough for common PC tasks but use a fraction of the power normally necessary for such things.
The TDP (thermal design power) is of 13W, but Intel claims the Core i5-3439Y, at least, has an SDP (“scenario-driven power”) of 7W.
In other words, unless the PC is running programs that set the Turbo Boost technology off, the chip will run on 7W.
Speaking of Turbo Boost, both units have this dynamic overclocking capability. It would not have been acceptable for them to lack the technology when almost all their predecessors had it.
The Core i5-3439Y has a base clock speed of 1.5 GHz and a Turbo Boost speed of 2.3 GHz. The Core i7-3689Y has the same base frequency, but a maximum performance of 2.6 GHz. The latter also has more cache memory (4 MB as opposed to 3 MB).
Needless to say, both ultrabook/tablet processors have HyperThreading support. For those that need a memory refresher, this doubles the number of cores that an operating system sees. As such, two physical cores mean four logical cores (threads).
Intel's Core i5-3439Y has a price of $250 / 190-250 Euro. The i7-3689Y will sell as part of ultraportable laptops for $362 / 275-362 Euro.