Intel’s next-gen ultrathin laptop chips revealed

The Intel Atom processors have been pretty neat, enabling us to have a whole generation of netbooks like the Asus Eee PC that are relatively fast and light on power. The’re pretty good for surfing the net, watching a couple of videos, and for finishing that stupid spreadsheet, but we all know that the Atom can do better.

Intel just revealed its plans for the next-generation CULV chips for the ultra-thin laptop space. From Liliputing:

At the bottom of the line, there will be a 1GHz Celeron U3400 chip and 1.2GHz Pentium U5400 processor. These will have a total power draw of 17 watts, which includes the graphics processor, which is built onto the same chip as the CPU.

As expected, there will also be new ULV Core i-series chips, including the Core i3-330UM, Core 5-430UM, Core i5-540UM, and Core i7-660UM.

These new chips will be rocking a 32-nanometer design which leads to a 12 percent power reduction compared to earlier CULV chips. And you don’t get only power reduction, these chips, according to Intel, also offers a performance boos of more than 30 percent.

CULVs aren’t exactly found in cheap netbooks. You’d be more likely to see these processors on ultra-thin netbooks, which are just as expensive as a mid-range full-sized laptop. Think of these ultra-thins as a high-end netbook where you can do so much more with it and for a longer battery life. The funny thing though, is that some ultra-thins still don’t have disk drives despite the fact that it’s almost full-sized.