Intel Arrandale Core i5 and Core i3 Mobile Unveiled

Looking back at silicon innovation over the past decade, you’ll notice three primary design targets that tend to dominate industry motivation and trends – power consumption, price and performance. As processor technologies evolve and new technologies are invented, there are rare moments in time when an innovation can hit upon all three design targets, unless of course you’re in marketing and actually believe all that Kool-Aid you’re feeding the customer base. Usually, true innovation is required to deliver lower power, lower cost and higher performance together, though through simple optimization and iteration, you can typically capitalize on one or two of the three.

For many years now, notebook architectures have followed a relatively iterative track. New processor cores were developed for notebooks and companion chipsets were delivered to support these new CPU core architectures. In reality, high-level architecture didn’t change much really until Intel’s Mobile Core i7 (Lynnfield) series processor came to market. With an integrated memory controller, Intel’s Clarksfield architecture, took Intel’s 3-chip mobile platform, to a two-chip approach that was primarily a performance play more than anything else but also drove some cost out of the solution as well.

Read more: hothardware.com