CES: Intel Announces Faster MacBooks

Well, not exactly. But the debut of Intel’s Penryn laptop processors at the Consumer Electronics Show today likely means there are some big changes in store for Apple’s product line, and we’ll almost undoubtedly see a few of them at Macworld next week.

Intel uncrated 16 of the new processors, all of them smaller, denser and faster than their predecessors, thanks to the company’s 45-nanometer manufacturing process. Among Intel’s Penryn offerings: chips ranging in performance from 2.10GHz with the Core 2 Duo T8100 processor to 2.80GHz with the Core 2 Extreme X9000.