Intel expands offerings for thin-and-light notebooks

Two upcoming notebooks from Asus.
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The 3.06GHz T9900 processor is the first Core 2 Duo from the company to go beyond 3GHz. Though it touts faster performance, energy efficiency has also been improved to prolong the battery life of notebooks. This is attributed to the chip's ability to enter and get out of idle mode quickly so energy is not wasted when the user is not performing any CPU-intensive tasks. The other two standard voltage C2D processors announced are the P9700 (2.8GHz) and P8800 (2.66GHz).

Targeted for use in thin-and-light notebooks, the new 1.3GHz SU2700 CULV processor is meant for consumer products at mainstream price points.

Thin-and-lights have traditionally higher prices, but Intel foresees that changing in the coming year. It expects about 20 percent of all consumer notebooks found on the market to be in this category by the end of 2009.

Intel also officially announced the Pine Trail platform for Netbooks. Information regarding this was available prior to Computex, and as expected, this Atom platform integrates the graphics and processing cores into a single chip codenamed Pineview. This is scheduled to go into production in Q4 2009. According to Shmuel Eden, vice president of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, Pine Trail will feature a more powerful graphics core. No specific details on the graphics performance were given, but Eden said these will be revealed during the Intel Developer Forum later this year.

Expect to see a slew of new thin-and-light notebook announcements in the next few months. On display during Intel's event were many upcoming notebooks from various manufacturers that will employ the new chips and chipset. Unfortunately, detailed specifications are not available at this point in time. Check out the next page for upcoming notebooks with the new processors.