Earlier this month, Intel released a series of its Core 2 Quad processors with low power ratings, rated TDPs at 65W. This move served two purposes: to bring down the energy footprints of the CPUs, and to propagate quad-core chips to even those platforms whose electrical components are built for CPUs in that 65W power range. An example of that would be small form-factor PCs, mini-ITX motherboards with LGA-775 sockets, and some variants that might make it to notebooks. Intel now has plans to bring in a low-power Lynnfield processor sometime in Q1 2010. Given the amount of machinery the Lynnfield processors hold: four x86 processing cores, a dual-channel IMC, internal QPI and PCI-Express root complexes, in some cases even an IGP, a low-power variant sounds like a great engineering feat. We don't exactly know as to what low-power in context of Lynnfield is, at this point, but we can tell it will bring down platform power consumptions, given that the processor could end up being the single largest power consumer on a motherboard, and its power consumption affects that of the entire platform significantly.


Source: VR-Zone