There’s a new Intel ghost CPU out there.
If you don’t know what I mean by that, a ghost piece of equipment is the opposite of vaporware. Instead of existing only on paper, ghost products exist everywhere but on paper. They’re being put in machines, but the company doesn’t admit to their existence in its documentation.
Intel started this practice with a few of its laptop Core Duo products, like the T2050 and T2250. They’re slightly slower than the “official” (generally due to a lower FSB), but cost appreciably less (i.e. $40-50) than the slowest “official” model.
Presumably, this has helped Intel compete without disrupting its “official” pricing structure.
Well, the first “ghost” Merom has shown up. It’s called the T5200. It runs at 1.6Ghz/533MHz FSB compared to the T5500s 1.66GHz/667MHz FSB.
As LaptopLogic recently pointed out, these initially showed up in just prebuilt machines; they’re now starting to show up in configurable models, for instance the Dell E1405 and E1705 models and the HP dv9000t.
This is nothing earthshaking, but $40-50 is $40-50 and puts more pressure on AMD to come up with cheaper, and, perhaps more importantly, a yet higher percentage of dual-cores to further strain their capacity.
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