Asus UX21

Intel has added three new chips to its line of Sandy Bridge processors. While most of the company’s laptop chips use between 25W and 35W, the new chips have a TDP of just 17W. That’s about twice what you’d expect from the latest Intel Atom chips, but it should be good enough to offer better battery life and lower heat generation than a typical laptop processor.

Those are the features you really want from chips designed for thin and light laptops. Intel is pushing these chips for use in what the company calls “ultrabooks,” or thin and light machines that can be sold for under $1000.

Here’s a brief overview of the new chips:

All three chips are 64-bit processors built with a 32nm process. They each support hyperthreading, so the dual core chips can process up to 4 threads at a time. The chips can support up to 8GB of DDR3 memory. They also feature integrated Intel graphics which can run at speeds between 350 MHz and 1.2 GHz.

CNET reports that one of the first laptops to use the Core i5-2557M will be the recently announced Asus UX21 ultrabook.

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5 replies on “Intel introduces new low power chips for thin and light laptops”

  1. BTW, I don’t think these are overclockable, but instead turbo boost to the higher speeds…  Important semantic point.

  2. I can’t avoid the negative on some stories. Oh well. I would like to use the “F” word to describe how I feel about this. Ultrabooks? They can stick that up their you know what. I get sick of the internet and clowns who like to confuse the consumers. Another G-Damn term? Another term to describe what essentially is that portable secondary laptop? Just like superphones. It’s asinine. A new term for every upgrade to existing products? Idiots. I get it, after superphones it there will be super duper phones. Did I mention I’m sick of term creation? Ultra thin, thin and light, netbook, chromebook, ultrabook, ultraportable, subnotebook, mini laptop, mini notebook, smartbook, premium netbook, ulv, culv. Brad don’t you have one that you can come up with also?

    1. While I’m sure Intel would like to convince you to pick up one of these guys as a secondary laptop, I think they’ve finally started to transcend that category. These new chips are more powerful than the one powering the desktop computer I work on for 10+ hours per day. 

      But yes, I think ultrabook is a silly marketing term which Intel will probably replace with something else in another year or two.

      That’s why I make sure to write things like “what the company calls ultrabooks” instead of just adopting the term myself. I’m not promising I’ll never use it, but I don’t really expect it to stick around any more than UMPC or any number of other buzzwords.

      Netbook has had remarkable staying power, but that’s probably because nobody could ever agree on what it meant. 🙂

      1. Hey Brad. Thanks for hearing out my rant. I like the progression of the chip for sure. I suspect this is for the Apple competitors which will serve up something similar to the Samsung Series 9. Samsung needs another competitor so they can be forced to drop their price a bit. Overall, it’s good news for the consumers. 

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