Discussions

It’s codenamed Arrandale and if you’re looking for a reason to upgrade your notebook, I believe this may just be that reason.

Intel’s Arrandale processor is a member of the Westmere family.  None of these code names really matter because they’ll be gone by the time the product ships.  All you need to know is that Arrandale will be the 32nm mobile version of Intel’s Core i7.  It may get called something else (Core i5 perhaps?), but it’s the lineage that counts folks.

Arrandale is a dual core chip with Hyper Threading, meaning it can work on four threads at once.  If the impact of HT on Core i7 is any indication, we should see some serious performance gains simply due to HT on its dual core brethren.

Intel launched i7 at the very high end and the technology will trickle down over time.  Thanks to its high end nature, the chips all drew high wattages. Despite that fact, the Core i7 was particularly power efficient.  At the same TDP as its Core 2 predecessor, the Core i7 will generally draw less power while offering the same performance, or offer better performance per watt.  While this is a nice feature to have on a high end desktop, it’s absolutely necessary on a notebook.

My guess for performance?  I believe, depending on the app, you’ll see similar improvements to what we saw on the desktop with i7.  That is 0 - 30% at the same clock speed compared to an existing Core 2 notebook.
Battery life should improve as well thanks to Arrandale’s superior power efficiency.

All of these are safe bets but there’s just one more thing.  Arrandale ships with a 45nm graphics core on the same package as the CPU.  It’s not going to be anything earth shattering in terms of gaming performance (albeit better than existing Intel graphics), but power consumption should be quite good.

Arrandale is due out in the last three months of 2009, but OEMs may not have notebooks until the start of 2010 (hence the range in the title).  I’m betting the wait will be worth it.