Notebook Core 2 Extreme Processor

Some of you may know that Intel recently released an Extreme series gaming processor for notebooks. Just looking for feedback on it.

 

I thought it was coming out in Q3 or Q4

 

I'm curious to know if it will be an easy drop in to one of the newer socket-P Santa Rosa notebook(s) (that currently have one of the newer core 2 duo's already) without any additional bios. I would also like to know how hot they will run.

*2.8GHz X7900 and 2.6GHz X7800, featuring 800MHz FSB/4MB L2 cache

http://swik.net/User:stinkyworld/Engadget+feeds/Intel+Core+2+Extreme+laptops+in+July%3F/bbxz0

 

correct me if i'm wrong, the biggest and probably the only selling point for the extreme series are unlocked multipliers, so unless you plan to overclock theres little if any advantage.

 

The Core 2 Extreme is great, but in a notebook, it will be a thick one, all of them are with extremes. I would stay with a core 2 duo in a laptop

 

unlocked multipliers? ok.. so im a semi-noob... so sorry for asking.. but wat do these multipliers do... and how are they unlocked?
for my desktop i have a p4 3.2 Extreme Ed.... woulld mine have something similar...?

 

ok your computer have a FSB of certain mhz and your CPU have an inherent multiplier. you multiply the 2 to get your CPU speed.
Most CPUs(non-extremem versions etc) have a locked multiplier, so to overclock them you have to increase the FSB which in turn can demand more expensive higher speed ram.
for extreme edition CPUs, you can change the multiplier, so you can overclock without changing the FSB. so really, they don't really do much, maybe except make overclocking a bit easier.

 

well they dont have locked multipliers these days but rather certain multipliers are locked. using power management software such as speedstep or cool n quiet the CPU lowers its multiplier and therefore lowering its speed in order to save power. so the CPU will have a small range of multipliers it can choose but only upto its rated speed.

with an unlocked multiplier you can choose the multiplier without restriction or atleast the restriction will be the range the motherboard options have.

so the difference is basically the extreme CPUs allow you to choose whatever multipliers are given as options in your motherboard while other CPUs have locked the multipliers to a selected range.

 

Multipliers multiply the clock speed of the Front Side Bus (link between CPU and RAM/Northbridge) by a certain amount, so that the RAM does not wait for the CPU, but the CPU waits for the RAM.

By increasing the multiplier by a certain amount, the speed of the FSB is multiplied more. The clock speed of the processing core is increased, and so, more calculations can be carried out each second, increasing speed. This is a way of overclocking (increasing the speed of a processor, to a level greater than the factory defaults).

If you have locked multipliers, you may not be able to overclock the core, or it may be very difficult to do otherwise.

The downsides of this method of overclocking is that FSB speed stays the same, so the rate at which data is channeled to the RAM stays the same, creating a big bottleneck.