14 DAY TRIAL // Back in June at the Computex fair, Intel announced that its next-generation Ivy Bridge mobile processors will feature a new configurable TDP technology, which was just detailed by the company earlier today.
This new technology will allow Ivy Bridge chips to increase their operating TDP over their maximum rating by ramping up the operating frequency, depending on the load placed on the cores and on the cooling that is available to the notebooks using them.
What this means is that when the laptop detects that it is being used together with an optional dock or high-performance cooling mode, this will behave like a higher wattage part, reaching much larger TDPs.
According to information received by the AnandTech website straight from Intel, Ivy Bridge ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors will carry three TDP ratings.
The first one of these is the nominal power rating, which just as in the case of ULV Sandy Bridge CPUs is set at 17W, a lower configurable TDP (cTDP down) and an upper configurable TDP (cTDP up).
Just as its name implies, cTDP down enables the chip to fit into tighter power envelopes (13W in this case) and is designed for increasing the notebooks battery life, while the cTDP up mode increases performance, making the chip behave like a 33W CPU when docked.
Apart from ULV processors, Intel also wants to use the configurable TDP technology in its Extreme Edition Ivy Bridge processors, which will be able to switch from their nominal 55W TDP into a 65W or 45W operating mode.
Intel's Ivy Bridge processors are a die 22nm shrink of the Sandy Bridge core and feature an improved GPU with DirectX 11 support and more EUs, better AVX performance, an integrated PCI Express 3.0 controller as well as native USB 3.0 support thanks to the Panther Point chipsets.
These first Ivy Bridge processors are expected to debut in April/May 2012 and will rapidly take the place of the current Sandy Bridge CPUs.