Mid-range under attack
All mainstream Westmere chips, be they mobile (Arrandale) or desktop (Clarkdale) will have integrated graphics in situ. By combining the CPU and GPU, Intel is exercising ever-greater control over how mid-range PCs are built. The company's market share for graphics will rise, of course, because every mainstream chip will have them integrated, whether you want them or not.
Cleverly, Intel is maintaining the same desktop socket as for the recently-released Lynnfield CPUs - LGA1156. This means that all Clarkdale chips will fit into Lynnfield-orientated motherboards, albeit without the integrated graphics active. Intel is also releasing a range of specific motherboards - H55, H57, Q55, Q57, et al - that natively support the integrated graphics function via what's known as a Flexible Display Interface (FDI) link.
Making the most of the socket compatibility, Lynnfield LGA1156 chips - Core i5 750, Core i7 860, Core i7 870 - also work in Clarkdale-optimised boards. We look at the H55 and H57 chipsets a little later on in this article.
Out goes Core 2 Duo. AMD's mid-range under attack?
A smaller CPU core and 45nm graphics intimates that it makes sense for Intel to push these new chips for present platforms that use a CPU and GPU combination which pulls around 75W on the desktop and up to 35W on mobile. This means that present Core 2 Duo (and even Quad) CPUs and a vast range of AMD offerings are under direct attack from Westmere. We know that the new architecture will be potent on a clock-for-clock basis, as it's hewn from range-leading Nehalem, and the presence of Turbo Boost and hyper-threading will help bridge the gap to the very best mid-range chips available.
Intel's strategy with Westmere is disarmingly simple. Replace present Core 2 Duo - mobile and desktop - with a better-performing architecture at a similar price, and throw in integrated graphics for 'free'. The distillation of Nehalem to a lower-power chip has been a long time in coming, sure, but it's here now.
