Intel releases fastest laptop chips to date

Intel today released its fastest laptop processor to date, also setting the stage to release its next generation of chips for mainstream laptops.

The new Core i7 processors are Intel's first laptop chips based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, and include many enhancements that allow the processors to outperform existing Core 2 laptop processors. The quad-core processors are targeted at high-performance gaming laptops and business workstations.

The Nehalem microarchitecture is considered a significant upgrade over Intel's earlier microarchitectures, as it cuts bottlenecks to improve overall system speed and performance-per-watt. The new chips are also able to shut down dormant cores and move the extra processing power to active cores. The technology, called Turbo Boost, can boost chip speeds up to 3.33GHz depending on the power drawn by the laptops.

Intel introduced three Core i7 processors on Wednesday. The Core i7 920XM will run at 2.0GHz, with up to 8MB of cache. The Core i7-820QM will run at 1.73GHZ, with 8MB of cache. The Core i7-720QM will run at 1.6GHz and include 6MB of cache. The chips will be made using the 45-nanometer manufacturing process. The i7-920XM, i7-820QM and i7-720QM processors are priced at $1,054, $546 and $364, respectively, in units of 1,000.

The chips' launch also sets the stage for Intel to introduce its next generation of laptop chips based on Nehalem. The company will deliver faster and more power-efficient chips based on Nehalem to budget laptops.

"We are going to bring [Nehalem] technology to the masses early next year," said David Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's architecture group, during a speech at the Intel Developer Forum trade in San Francisco.

Intel hopes to create more integrated chips that pack even more features as it moves to the latest chip manufacturing process by the end of this year. The company will start making laptop processors using the latest 32-nm process in the fourth quarter. Intel has seen a 30-times reduction in power consumption in 32-nm process chips compared to the 45-nm process.

The first 32-nm chips for budget laptops, code-named Arrandale, will be a significant upgrade to existing Core 2 Duo chips. Arrandale is a two-chip package with an integrated graphics processor, which could help improve graphics performance while drawing less power. The initial chips will come in dual-core configurations with 4MB of cache. The chips allow each core to run two threads simultaneously so more tasks can be run at the same time.

The new chips will be part of the Westmere microarchitecture, which is a shrink of Intel's existing Nehalem microarchitecture. Nehalem provides a faster pipe for the CPU to communicate with system components like a graphics card. Nehalem chips integrate a memory controller onto the chip to provide a faster access path to memory.

PC makers including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Asustek Computer started shipping laptops today with the latest Nehalem chips.

Dell has already started putting the new Core i7 chips in multimedia laptops. The new Studio 17 will come with the Core i7-720QM and include the 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium OS, which is eligible for a Windows 7 upgrade. It also offers ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 graphics, supports up to 4GB of DDR3 memory and includes two 1.5-watt speakers and a 6-watt subwoofer in the case. It includes a 17.3-inch display, comes with a 2-megapixel webcam and supports up to 250GB of storage. It comes with a 9-cell battery, though Dell didn't immediately comment on battery life. Its prices start at $1,099.

Dell's laptops with 15.6-inch screens -- the Studio 15 and Studio XPS 16 laptops -- will also include new processors. Studio 15 prices start at $999, while the Studio XPS 16 starts at $1,249. Dell's Alienware gaming unit also launched the new Alienware M15x laptop with the Core i7-920XM laptop, which has a 15-inch screen and Nvidia's GeForce graphics card.

Toshiba launched the Qosmio X505-Q850 laptop, which has a hulking 18.4-inch display and includes Intel's Core i7-720QM processor. It supports up to 6GB of memory and 320GB of storage. It will include Nvidia's GeForce GTX graphics card. Pricing for the product hasn't been set, and it will be available next month.

Intel to ship new Pineview netbook chips in Q4

Intel will ship a new line of Atom processors for netbooks and nettops during the fourth quarter of this year, a company official said late on Wednesday.

Processors codenamed Pineview will succeed the Atom chips that currently go into most netbooks, said Jeff DeMuth, who works with Intel's platform marketing, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The processor will ship to PC makers in the fourth quarter, DeMuth said.

DeMuth declined comment on when netbooks with Pineview chips would reach consumers. However, netbooks could ship a few months later, perhaps as early as the first quarter of 2010.

Netbooks are small and inexpensive laptops designed to run Web and basic productivity applications. Intel introduced the first Atom chips last year, and today most netbooks are based on the processor.

Earlier this year, Intel said it was going to update the original Atom chips with the Pineview chips, which would be faster and lead to thinner netbook designs with better battery life. Pineview is part of the Pine Trail platform, which has a number of improvements that makes the chip smaller while dropping power consumption.

Intel will also ship new chips as part of the Pine Trail platform for nettops, small form factor desktops the size of hard cover books.

The chip integrates graphics and memory controller inside the CPU, which has reduced the package size by as much as 70 percent compared to the previous generation of Atom chips, DeMuth said. Intel officials have said they wanted to make smaller chip packages so PC makers can design thinner netbooks. The integrated chips also reduce the power drawn by netbooks.

Integrating the memory controller will help the processor and memory communicate faster. An integrated graphics processor will process multimedia faster, while freeing up bandwidth for the processor to communicate with other components.

Intel's current netbook architecture puts the graphics and memory capabilities on a separate chipset. However, as netbook users demand better graphics, Intel's integrated graphics have been criticized for limited multimedia capabilities. DeMuth declined to comment on the level of video support offered by Pineview's integrated graphics chip.

The integration also helps reduce the CPU cost which could lead to cheaper devices, DeMuth said.

How could iPhone MMS crash AT&T's network?

All the hand wringing over the Friday launch of MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) on AT&T iPhones may be misplaced for a service that hasn't been a huge success on most other phones.

Apple let down iPhone watchers and owners when it announced in June that iPhone 3.0 software would support MMS but implied that AT&T would not yet allow it. The service launch was delayed several times, with exclusive carrier AT&T citing the need to make sure its network was ready. The feature will finally become generally available on AT&T iPhones on Friday, when iTunes delivers a carrier settings update for the wildly popular phone. The carrier has said it expects "record volumes" of MMS traffic after the launch. MMS lets people send pictures, audio recordings, video clips or contact information along with an SMS (Short Message Service) message.

However, the service in question has been out for years on other handsets and hasn't exactly taken the mobile world by storm. In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.

Given the amount of data that iPhone fans are already using on AT&T's network for Web browsing, video, e-mail and social networking, it would take quite a popularity breakthrough for MMS to drag down the infrastructure through sheer traffic, analysts said. However, the carrier's fears in one respect may have been justified, said ABI analyst Dan Shey.

Several factors have dampened the popularity of MMS, according to analysts and industry observers. A big one is that the messages still don't always get through.

"Interoperability between carriers has always been an issue, and that's why MMS usage hasn't really taken off," Shey said. Delivering multimedia content from one phone and one network to another can be complicated with photos and gets even more involved when it comes to video, with large file sizes and multiple available formats, he said. What's attached in an MMS, 98 percent of the time, is just a picture, he said.

Another problem has been the complicated user interfaces on some phones and networks, which at times have forced senders to go through several steps to attach their content and recipients to go to a link within an SMS and provide a password along the way. The iPhone streamlines this process for iPhone users but not necessarily for the recipients of their messages.

The economics of MMS may not be attractive for either users or service providers. Even though each message uses a lot more network capacity than an SMS, which is limited to 160 characters of text, they typically count the same as an SMS against a bundled plan, Shey said. As a result, carriers haven't had an incentive to market the capability, he said.

Users of advanced phones now have alternatives to being charged for sharing content with their friends. For example, it's possible to post a photo to a Facebook page directly through Facebook's iPhone application.

Carriers will eventually figure out a way to monetize user sharing of content, but it probably won't be through MMS, said Mark Jacobstein, CEO of iSkoot, at the Mobilize conference earlier this month in San Francisco. Jacobstein is a serial entrepreneur in the mobile data world whose current company develops a variety of phone software. "The problem is not demand but implementation," he said.

The increase in MMS traffic from iPhone users isn't likely to put a much greater strain on AT&T's network, said In-Stat infrastructure analyst Allen Nogee. The carrier's current woes stem from having to deploy new base stations for 3G while selling a hugely popular handset that subscribers love to use for data, he said. Most customers won't just send one big MMS after another and overload the network, Nogee said.

However, AT&T may have had good reason to make sure its infrastructure was ready for MMS, ABI's Shey said. Even if the new feature doesn't swallow huge amounts of overall capacity, all those messages eventually need to be separated out and sent through an exchange point called an MMSC (MMS service center). AT&T's engineers may have set up that infrastructure for a smaller number of messages and then faced the prospect of MMS becoming possible on all iPhones.

If they learned anything from the experience of watching data traffic grow exponentially after the iPhone itself hit the market, they may have wanted to beef up the MMS portion of their system before the new feature hit all those phones, Shey said.

"All operators are just fanatic about ensuring that their network is not overutilized," Shey said. "I'm sure the network folks got involved and said, 'We'd better test this.'"