We already mentioned Intel’s NM70, an entry level Chief River chipset that should accommodate cheap 17W Celeron 847 and 807 mobile processors, here.

While the specification of the chipset hasn’t changed in the meantime, it looks like Intel is planning to add support for Celeron Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge dual-core processors with TDPs up to 35W. Currently we don’t have any details about the exact model, or models that Intel has in mind.

More important low-voltage processors like Celeron 807 and 847 are supported by this chipset and we like both of them for their 17W TDP and very reasonable pricing.

We also stumbled upon another chipset called HM70 that also supports both of these 17W and 35W mobile Celerons. They both share the same 1.5MB firmware size, a common size for cheaper chipsets. In high end mobile chipsets this size goes up to 5MB.

Intel officially only lets you use 17W and 35W Celerons with these ultra-cheap chipsets, it explicitly tells partners that it won’t validate any other processor for this platform. It could work but for Core i5 or Core i7 processors you need at least an HM75 or better chipset.