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Intel rolled out Mooly Eden to announce the arrival of mobile Nehalem, or mobile Core i7, or even Clarksfield if you want to list all of the many monikers associated with the latest mobile chip. The ever confusing array of names for a new Intel product can however, on this occasion be forgiven, since Mooly's presence on stage is always a highlight at IDF.

There will be three mobile Core i7 parts at launch with the range topping Extreme 920XM running at 2.0GHz and the mainstream 820QM and 720QM parts clocked at 1.73GHz and 1.6GHz respectively. However, those clocks can increase significantly thanks to Turbo Boost Technology.


With Turbo Boost a Clarksfield system can adapt itself to suit the type of work it's processing. So, if you're running a lightly threaded, or even single threaded process, Clarksfield can shut down three of its four cores, and use the power saved to increase the clock frequency of the active core. Consequently the 2GHz Extreme part can clock up to 3.2GHz, while the 1.73GHz and 1.6GHz chips can boost to 3.06GHz and 2.8GHz respectively.




Also, when Clarksfield turns off a core, it really means off. With transistor switched power gating, the inactive cores are pretty much isolated from the power, thus removing the opportunity for leakage through idle cores.


As well as the four physical cores, Clarksfield also supports Hyper Threading technology, so it can process up to eight threads simultaneously. There's also up to 8MB of cache shared between the cores - the full 8MB on the 920XM and 820QM and 6MB on the 720QM.

I'll be chasing up Clarksfield notebooks as soon as I'm back in the UK, so look out for a full review of the new platform soon.

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