At a Computex event today, Intel officially unveiled its 965 Express chipset (the P965, codenamed ‘Broadwater’) for use with its forthcoming line of Core 2 Duo processors. The company confirmed the accelerated launch schedule for the Core 2 rollout: Woodcrest (a Xeon replacement) in June, Conroe (for desktops) in July, and Merom (for laptops) in August. There’s also an ultra low voltage Merom in the works for use in very thin portables from Dell and HP.
Oh yeah, like Apple isn’t going to go for a piece of that action in the next year or two.
How low are we talking? Am I going to have noticably longer battery life with one of these? That’s way, way, waaay more important to me than speed. 5 year old CPUs are plenty fast for the vast majority of workloads.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20060419102723.html
The Core Solo ULV chips consume 5.5 watts. Although not the same as the Core 2 Duo ULV, it does give you an idea of “how low.”
Thanks for the link!
Personally, I’d like to see another chip that focuses more on power savings. Looks like the Core Solo uses more juice than the Pentium M. I hope the Core 2 starts a different trend.
Over at Engadget they say the ULV version will sip 0.75W, and the non-ULV, “one to two watts”. Sounds pretty incredible to me.
finally!! going to get a quare core mac pro with 64 bit capabilities, dual sli i hope
While you’re correct that Merom (mobile Core Duo) processor will provide EMT64 it will be dual core, not quad core. The quad core processor when developed will be released for the server line. Maybe in another year we may see a quad core mobile solution for laptops.
I think these cpus are also 64bit, right? If yes, I am all for a new Macbook.
Yes, and it appears to be a better implementation than the P4 had.
definitely 64 bit capable, the EMT64 instructions are included at least in the conroe (desktop version), not sure if it’s needed in laptop, you don’t necessarily need to address much more than 4 GB of memory for a laptop is my guess, especially if you want good battery life.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/05/first_benchmarks_conroe_vs_f…
take a look at the pic from tomshardware from a cpu-z output
i wonder how pissed off the super computer folks at Virginia Tech are now that their xserves are 5x slower and generate much more heat. for those of you that want used g5 xserves, you’ll probably be able to get them discounted very soon. muhahahha
Replacing my Pentium D 920 for one of those?
Maybe it is, but not immediately as they come out.
Too bad the chipsets supporting the new core2 will be consuming more watts (arround 23-24W).
It’s funny that when everyone keeps talking about the Performance/Watt ratio of the CPU’s, the chipsets that support them are forgotten and their power just keeps going up.
I just hope Tyan figures out how to use things things. It’d be cool to have a Tyan personal supercomputer, but not $10k worth of cool.
Looking forward to seeing an Arstechnica artical explaining the technology that Intel used vs. AMD using strained silicon and others licenced off IBM.
It would be nice to see Intel finally start using that much hyped CSI which is, according to Intel, mean to be the Hypertransport killer.