Intel Unveils Broadwell 'Core M' Chips for Cooler, Lighter Laptops

Intel on Monday unveiled a new line of microprocessors aimed at powering thinner and cooler personal computers and other devices. The new chips will ship to partners in late 2014, and the first machines using them will hit shelves by the end of 2014.

The Core M chip codenamed Broadwell "will be used to manufacture a wide range of high-performance to low-power products including servers, personal computing devices and Internet of Things."

One of the advantages of the chip is its small form factor, allowing for PCs that may not need cooling fans which take up space and create noise.

It uses a 14-nanometer fabrication process that allows more circuits to be placed on the chip than its predecessors.

"The combination of the new microarchitecture and manufacturing process will usher in a wave of innovation in new form factors, experiences and systems that are thinner and run silent and cool," Intel said in a statement.

Intel had first unveiled the Core M chips as well as a fanless mobile PC reference design at Computex, calling the new 14nm chips the most energy-efficient Intel Core processor in the company's history

Intel remains the world's biggest producer of chips for personal computers but has been lagging in the surging mobile marketplace of tablets and smartphones.

It has been working to get a bigger slice of the mobile market, and its new chip offers a promise of lighter PCs that can better compete with tablets.

Intel had in late June unveiled refreshed Core i7, Core i5, Pentium and Celeron laptop CPUs based on its mainstream Haswell and low-power Bay Trail architectures. The new chips were updates to existing products in Intel's lineup, and bring slight speed improvements at the same prices as the models they supersede.

All seven i5 and i7 CPUs feature Hyper Threading, which allows each core to run up to two threads at a time for up to eight simultaneous threads on the quad-core SKUs.

Written with inputs from AFP