Unless all those reports on rumor sites two months ago were wrong, Intel's next-gen Nehalem architecture may not show up in notebooks until the second half of next year. If that's the case, what will Intel do with its dual-core mobile offerings once Core i7 CPUs are kicking around in desktops? Simple: raise clock speeds.
At least, that's what Fudzilla would have one believe. The site says Intel will introduce a 2.93GHz mobile Core 2 Duo priced at $530 in the first quarter of next year. That chip could supplant the existing $530 Core 2 Duo T9600, which runs at 2.8GHz with a 1066MHz front-side bus, 6MB of shared L2 cache and a 35W power envelope. Fudzilla claims the 2.93GHz chip will bear the Core 2 Duo T9800 name and sport the same FSB and cache size as the T9600.
Intel already has a dual-core mobile CPU clocked over 3GHz, but it's an $851 Core 2 Extreme model. The T9800 could not only cost less, but it may also bump the T9600 down to the next step in Intel's price ladder—perhaps $348 or $316. That could make speedier notebooks a tad more affordable.
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