Intel's New Superefficient-But-Fast Laptop Core i5 Chips on Jan. 7 [Intel]

Intel's dropping a big bowl o' chips January 7th—17 of 'em—like the first lower-end Core i3 chips, but we're most excited about the Arrandale Core i5 for laptops: still fast but more efficient 'cause they're shrunk to 32nm.
Remember all the excitement about Penryn a couple years ago, which took the Core 2 and made it more efficient with a new manufacturing process? It's the same deal here, as the tick of Intel's tick-tock cycle. "Tock" is a whole new microarchitecture, while "tick" is a die shrink of that, which makes it more power efficient. Nehalem is the tock—it was 45 nanometers—and Westmere is the tick, shrunk to 32nm.
Arrandale is what this set of mobile Core i5 chips, based on Westmere, is called. (Here's our primer on Intel codenames.) One thing in particular about Arrandale is that it has a graphics core built right onto the main chip package, which Intel says is good to go for Blu-ray.
Anyways, what all this means is that there's about to be a whole bunch of new laptops with faster, better Intel chips inside that won't munch your battery as hard.
[Gizmodo via Cnet]

Posted in: 32nm, Arrandale, Core i3, Core i5, intel, Laptop