Intel Boosts Mobile Processors’ Speed with Stepping Change

Intel is planning to do stepping change on its existing series of small package Core 2 Duo as well as Celeron M mobile processors in an effort to upgrade speed enhancement and eventually boost up system performance as a whole. The affected models include Core 2 Duo SL9300, SL9400, SP9300 and SP9400 with stepping change from C-0 to E-0 and Core 2 Solo SU3300, Core 2 Duo SU9300, SU9400 as well as Celeron M ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) model from M-0 to R-0.

Both stepping change are having a common goal: it will be a speed path improvement that will increase the clock frequency without major change in electrical, mechanical and thermal simulation. Normally, the giant company will do a silicon stepping change whenever there are some bug fixes or improvement made to its hardware processor. And there it will be a numbering prefixed with an alphabet that indicates how major the stepping change is. Obviously, this seems to be a major change but there is not much detail has been communicated except the speed path improvement.

The change will take effect by December 2008 and the actual mass shipment will happen on March 2009 only. No expectation of change to any customer’s board design if customer were to adopt the new stepping’s processor, except a new BIOS (that will check for silicon revison ID) that is claimed to be compatible with both current and new stepping will be released to cater for the stepping change.