Intel shares MacBook Air love with new small-footprint CPUs

In the blizzard of paper coming out of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), there was one announcement yesterday that has been virtually overlooked. Even Intel gave it only a cursory mention, stating [Dadi] "Perlmutter also introduced the company's second-generation dual-core mobile processors for increasingly popular ultra thin and light notebook PCs." That's not what anyone would call a high-profile introduction, but the processors themselves could be used by any company keen to compete with the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air is famous for being extremely thin, even when closed. Part of the secret sauce that enabled Apple to build the system is the small-footprint Merom processor that Intel accelerated into production for the company. As shown below, the packaging for the Merom processor at the heart of the MBA is significantly smaller than a standard mobile processor. Intel also compressed the 965 chipset and, in doing so, reduced the total CPU + chipset footprint by about 60 percent.

The new Centrino processors will be used in both Lenovo's X301 and HP's 2530p, and have a TDP of just 17W. Both the SL9400 (1.8GHz) and the SL9300 (1.6GHz) use a 1066MHz FSB and carry 6MB of L2 cache. Intel is also introducing a pair of 10W processors: the SU9400 (1.4GHz) and SU9300 (1.2GHz). Both of these chips run on an 800MHz FSB and carry 3MB of L2 cache.

Intel's representation of its shrinking chipsets, from full notebooks on one end to Atom on the other.

Apple will, of course, update and improve the MacBook Air, but the fact that these new chips are readily available to OEMs means that the company's second-generation MBA could face much stiffer competition. As for the new 10W parts, we could see them popping up in ultra-small form factor laptops as a way to increase battery life. A 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo may not be particularly compelling from a performance standpoint, but would still exceed the performance of a higher-clocked Atom, while potentially offering some of the features that typically delineate netbooks and notebooks.