The Intel Core i7 for notebooks was officially unveiled Today. Once codenamed Clarksfield, the quad-core processors share the same Nehalem architecture and 45 nanometer process as the desktop part but are designed to consume much less power, although more at peak than the Core 2 Quad. The top-end Core i7 Extreme consumes 55W where regular quad Core i7 mobile chips will use 45W.
Every model supports i7’s Hyperthreading, which can run up to two program threads per core and run as many as eight threads on today’s models. They also overcome the clock speed drop inherent to Core 2 Quad by using Turbo Boost: in tasks with less threads than actual cores, the new CPUs can shut down one or more cores while clocking the remaining cores much higher.
Three CPU versions have been launched. The i7-720QM and i7-820QM, run at 1.6GHz at 1.73GHz in normal use but ramp up to 2.8GHz and 3.06GHz respectively in Turbo Boost mode. They both also have 8MB of Level 2 cache. The Extreme variant is the i7-920XM and runs at 2GHz with all four cores but can scale up to 3.2GHz when necessary.
Alienware and Toshiba have already shown new laptops with the Core i7s
