Intel Goes Fast and Mobile

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Intel looks to walk the fine line between faster performance and lower power consumption with four new mobile processors it rolled out this morning.

The Low Voltage Pentium M, for instance, runs at a blazing 1.3 GHz but consumes only 12 watts of power. The other new chips are the Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M, which runs at 1.1 GHz and consumes 7 watts; the 1.4GHz Celeron M, which consumes 24.5 watts; and the Ultra Low Voltage Celeron M, which runs at 900 MHz and uses 7 watts.

All four of the chips, unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum in Tokyo early today, are built using the Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker's micro-architecture for mobile devices and a .13-micron manufacturing technique.

The Pentiums come with 1MB of Level 2 cache, while the less expensive Celerons have 512KB of Level 2 cache. The Pentiums also differ in that they were enhanced with what Intel is calling a "power-optimized" system bus that runs at 400MHz, a Micro-Ops Fusion function for merging CPU operations to lighten the load on the processor and a Dedicated Stack Manager capability. All these features play into the performance/power tradeoff Intel is addressing by providing faster execution of instructions with less power consumption, Intel officials said.