14 DAY TRIAL // The year that is about to end in a few days has been extremely generous to chip manufacturer Intel. It has been the first to switch to the 45-nanometer technology, and has been momentarily left without any competition on the CPU market. The next year may be even better and Intel has already unveiled the launch schedule for its new goodies.
Intel's new year will debut on 7th of January, when the chip giant will officially launch the 45nm 'Penryn' mobile processors line, as a part of the announced "Santa Rosa Refresh", an update to the company's mobile platform.
The processors line is made of five models: the T8100 and T8300 will feature a clock speed of 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, respectively, with 3MB of L2 cache for both cores. The faster T9300 and T9500 are alleged to run at 2.5GHz and 2.6GHz, respectively, with a shared cache of 6MB.
The Core 2 Extreme X9000 is the fifth chip to complete the Santa Rosa line. It will run at 2.8GHz and will feature 6MB of L2 cache. If the first four processors have a thermal envelope of 35W (just like the current Core 2 Duo processors), the latter takes up to 44W when running at full speed. The processor will be available only in notebooks branded "Centrino" and "Centrino vPro".
On January 20, Intel will release the first Core 2 Duo in the Penryn family, also known as "Wolfdale". The three processors will be clocked at 2.83GHz (E8300), 3.0GHz (E8400), and 3.16GHz (E8500). All of them will feature 6 MB of L2 cache as well as a 65-watts thermal envelope.
Intel will also release the E8190 processor, a version of the E8200 series that will not support virtualization. This CPU will run at 2.66GHz, with a 1333MHz frontside bus (FSB). It will also feature 6MB of L2 cache, with a 65W thermal envelope.