How do you define "Extreme"? How about as a high-velocity, quad-core processor packed into a mobile platform? That"s what Intel announced this afternoon at the Intel Developers Forum. Heretofore known as Core 2 Extreme, the cat (or chips) are now officially out of the bag.
In July, the first Core 2 Duo Extreme Mobile X9100--a Penryn dual-core CPU--to show up at our labs debuted inside Micro Express"s JFL9290 laptop. The PC World Test Center is still putting that machine through its paces (you can check out our assessment of its little brother, the Micro Express JFL9226, in the meantime), but the initial numbers are impressive. It dominated our WorldBench 6 tests, notching a score of 115 and posting decent frame rates in Doom 3 (47 frames per second at 1024 by 768 resolution, with antialiasing) courtesy of a 256MB nVidia GeForce 9600M GT GPU. The real speed king, though, is the QX9300 (a Penryn Quad Core)--and it"s now out the door, launching this week.