A considerable portion of our readers are looking forward to MacBooks Pro with Core i7 processors, but can this chip be used only in portable machines with a high thermal envelope and intended for the professional market? Apparently, a negative answer to this question should be given by Intel in a few months, when a low voltage edition of it should be launched on the market.
Because it is an ultralight notebook, the MacBook Air is a candidate for using this processorLow voltage processors are aimed at ultralight notebooks and do not usually have operating frequencies above 2GHz so in the case of Core i7, they would be available with speeds from 1.33GHz to 1.6GHz. However, a chip quad-core employed on a machine like the MacBook Air would make a huge difference in terms of performance and energy efficiency, which are the goals that Intel wants to achieve with its partner manufacturers.
According to Fudzilla, the new low-voltage edition of the Core i7 is on its way to meet an important user need: to enjoy higher performance on very light machines. Now, even if not all software available because it supports parallel processing, the new processor will still be able to achieve 2.4GHz of operation through Turbo Boost technology, which does this by disabling idle processing cores.
The only problem that would exist for some manufacturers to use this Core i7 in ultralight notebooks is the fact that it cannot count on NVIDIA's integrated GPUs, which are much faster than the solution employed by Intel in the processor itself. Apple, for example, would not be able to use a GPU like the GeForce 9400M on a MacBook or MacBook Air with Core i7, something that can make it difficult to adopt until there is a solution for that.
(via Electronist)
