Intel's mobile chip for gamers coming soon

A mobile version of Intel's Core 2 Extreme chip will hit the market during the third quarter in high-end gaming notebooks equipped with Nvidia's SLI graphics system.

"You're going to see an extreme version of Merom on the notebook with Nvidia SLI in the third quarter," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group, during an interview. Merom is the code name for Intel's current line of mobile chips.

Maloney announced the upcoming chip during a keynote presentation at the Computex exhibition, which started today in Taipei.

"It's going to be for a hardcore gamer who values performance over anything and my suspicion is that you're going to see them in 17-inch [notebooks] and above, but we'll see," Maloney said. "At the Santa Rosa launch, there were 21-inch notebooks introduced."

Combined with Nvidia's SLI technology, which uses two graphics chips instead of one, notebooks based on the chip are intended to replace high-end desktops used by gamers.

This is the first time that Intel has developed a high-end mobile chip for gamers. Previously, the company's products for this market where designed for desktops, although that didn't stop Asustek Computer from shoehorning a Core 2 Extreme desktop chip into its C90 notebook, which was unveiled at Computex.

"The notebook business is getting to be a big, big, big business and it's splitting out into multiple segments," Maloney said.

Next year, Intel plans to offer mobile chips that often even more performance for gamers. At the Intel Developer Forum held in Beijing during April, the company revealed plans for a quad-core mobile chip to be released next year for gamers. That chip will be based on Penryn, a family of 45-nanometer chips that Intel plans to release later this year.