Digital Home Thoughts: Intel and ASUS Gives Notebooks a New Core

"The mobile market is growing and evolving rapidly. That fact is certainly not lost on Intel, which today launches its first Westmere-based Core i5 and i3 desktop processors code-named Clarkdale. As one might expect from a Nehalem-derived design with dual Hyper-Threaded, Turbo-Boosted cores, Clarkdale is all kinds of awesome. It's also not the only new CPU family launching today. Clarkdale has a mobile twin otherwise known as Arrandale."

Sure, it is not the super fast powerhouse that the Core i7 line is, but the mobile Core i5s and i3s are out and starting to find themselves in notebooks. Going over the numbers from TechReport, it does not appear to be leaps or bounds faster than the previous generation though graphics and power consumption have improved. Honestly, I'm underwhlemed. Short of adding more cores, and the top of the line enthusiast market, computing seems to have stagnated with most of the focus now going to power consumption. Longer battery life is great, and sure, for many tasks, the speeds at which CPUs run at now are more than adequate, but the speed race helped open new doors and possibilities. I do not really see that happening anytime in the near future with the newest crop of CPUs, or the wide spread popularity of netbooks. Innovation seems to be stuck on social networking and cloud computing instead.