A leak says Intel is building a 6-watt chip for cheap laptops that could run without a fan and last longer on a charge, but it will not suit heavy work.
A leak says Intel is working on a chip for cheap laptops that uses so little power that makers could drop the cooling fan. The chip, called Moon Lake, is rumored to be rated at 6 watts, compared with 15 to 20 watts for regular laptop chips. Intel has not confirmed any of it.
The report comes via Wccftech. Moon Lake would be a new family of entry-level processors with four low-power cores and no performance cores. The 6W number is the chip's thermal design power, which shows how much heat a laptop's cooling must handle. Intel's current Core Series 3 chips start at 10W. With less heat, laptops could skip the fan, and the battery could last longer. The chip would reportedly use Intel's 18A manufacturing process and pair with 8GB to 16GB of memory.
Without performance cores, heavy video editing or gaming is unlikely. Browsing, working on documents and streaming look like a better fit. Makers might be able to raise the power limit to 15W for extra speed, but that would bring more heat and fan noise.
Moon Lake would sit below Wildcat Lake, the Core Series 3 family that launched earlier this year with up to two performance cores and a power range of 10 to 28 watts. There is no official release date, and details could change before anything ships.
If you plan to buy a budget laptop, it may be worth waiting, but only if you mostly browse, stream and write documents.
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