The world might not be hanging on the release of the new Intel (News - Alert) Core M processors that the company is expected to announce on Friday, the way they were tuned in to Apple’s iPhone 6 announcement earlier this week. But in many ways, the new processor will impact technology use more than the much-heralded new iPhone (News - Alert).
That’s because the new Core M processors are changing the way computers are made, and will be in the heart of many devices starting later this year.
The new Core M promises to enable more high-performance computing with less energy use and a smaller form-factor. It will enable high performance without the need for a fan, both good for the ears and good for computing devices that want to shrink in size and weight.
Intel claims that with the new processors, users will see CPU performance up to 50 percent faster, graphics performance up to 40 percent faster, and battery life up to 1.7 hours longer depending on use. It will improve wireless display and wireless docking, and smart sound technology.
While many users are caring less about processor speed since much of the computing horsepower has moved to the cloud, they do want lighter devices that last longer between charges. The Core M is just the processor for those needs.
Intel has pushed the thermal design power of the Core M down to the 4.5W range, which means tablet convertibles can skip the fan but not the power, unlike the current generation of processors that force manufacturers to decide between less powerful Atom processors or more powerful Haswell chips that need a fan.
“Haswell’s good, but there was still a piece that was missing, and we had to push it even further… and the next thing was, how do we make this thing fanless,” Intel marketing manager Andy Cummins told PC World recently. “Because we really wanted to make a 2-in-1, and we’d have to make one of the [pieces] a real tablet, not where the computing [chip] is in the base.”
The Core M chips achieve this partially by aggressive power management that enables the chips to sip power most of the time but burst when more heft is needed. Base speeds of just 1.1GHz sound pretty slow, but the chips can go into “turbo mode” and rocket up to a maximum of 2.6GHz when needed.
The graphics portion of the chip, the onboard Intel HD Graphics 5300, can be clocked anywhere from a base frequency of just 100MHz to 800MHz or higher, letting the chip work from power-saving mode until high-performance is needed.
The Core M will change the lives of more folks than the iPhone 6 in that it will change what everyone, Apple (News - Alert) included, is able to do with their hardware designs. But unlike the iPhone 6, it will do it a lot less visibly.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson