Intel shares MacBook Air love with new small-footprint CPUs
 

In the blizzard of paper coming out of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), there was one announcement yesterday that has been virtually overlooked. Even Intel gave it only a cursory mention, stating [Dadi] "Perlmutter also introduced the company's second-generation dual-core mobile processors for increasingly popular ultra thin and light notebook PCs." That's not what anyone would call a high-profile introduction, but the processors themselves could be used by any company keen to compete with the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air is famous for being extremely thin, even when closed. Part of the secret sauce that enabled Apple to build the system is the small-footprint Merom processor that Intel accelerated into production for the company. As shown below, the packaging for the Merom processor at the heart of the MBA is significantly smaller than a standard mobile processor. Intel also compressed the 965 chipset and, in doing so, reduced the total CPU + chipset footprint by about 60 percent.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...bile-cpus.html