The microprocessor in the MacBook Air is an Intel Core 2 Duo with the following features:
1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessor
Optional 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessor
4 MB shared, on-chip L2 cache
Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost
Connection to the North Bridge over an 800 MHz frontside bus
Supports Intel 64 Architecture
See the Intel Core 2 Duo Processors support site for detailed microprocessor documentation.
Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost accelerates data manipulation by applying a single instruction to multiple data at the same time, known as SIMD processing. SIMD technology accelerates vector math operations and floating-point calculations. Advanced Digital Media Boost supports Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) versions 1, 2, 3, and 4 and allows the processor to execute most 128-bit instructions every clock cycle.
For information on Advanced Digital Media Boost, refer to Technology@Intel Magazine.
Intel 64 Architecture increases the linear address space for software to 64 bits and supports physical address space up to 40 bits. The technology also introduces a new operating mode referred to as IA-32e mode. IA-32e mode operates in one of two sub-modes:
Compatibility mode enables a 64-bit operating system to run most legacy 32-bit software unmodified
64-bit mode enables a 64-bit operating system to run applications written to access 64-bit address space
In the 64-bit mode, applications may access:
64-bit flat linear addressing
8 additional general-purpose registers (GPRs)
8 additional registers for streaming SIMD extensions (SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE4)
64-bit-wide GPRs and instruction pointers
Uniform byte-register addressing
Fast interrupt-prioritization mechanism
New instruction-pointer relative-addressing mode
An Intel 64 Architecture processor supports existing IA-32 software because it is able to run all non-64-bit legacy modes supported by IA-32 architecture. Most existing IA-32 applications also run in compatibility mode.