INTEL

Intel has already had the 45-nm derivates on the market for a while now. The already widespread Penryn processors have now received little brethren in form of Atom CPUs, targeting mobile platforms. They are a part of the Atom platform, supports speeds of up to 1.86 GHz and have 512 KB of L2 cache. They are the size of a eurocent (actually, even a little bit smaller) and have a thermal dissipation of 2 (yes, two) W in full load. Also, alongside the fact that Intel is celebrating 40 years of existence, it is also Centrino's fifth anniversary. The next Centrino generation is due for the second half of 2008 under the “Intel Centrino 2” brand. The new platform has an increase of battery autonomy as the primary goal. Performance has been improved as well, and since the HD video is finally getting momentum, chipset-decoded HD video is also something that will impact battery life. For performance-hungry visitors, an Intel Core2 Extreme QX9770 was on display – this CPU has 12 MB of L2 cache, works on a 1600 MHz QPB and has four cores working at 3.2 GHz each. When combined with an Intel X48 chipset, the new CPU achieves revolutionary results and performs the most arduous of tasks. These processors should just have hit the market in the beginning of April.