With all the fuss around the adoption of the new NVIDIA chipsets it has been overlooked that Apple has adopted some aspects of Intel's Montevina platform in the new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks.
The key advantage of Montevina is the increased front-side bus speed which is now 1066MHz as well as the inclusion of the latest 45nm Penryn processors.
The MacBook Air also benefited from technology improvements, Intel has confirmed that the MacBook Air now uses a standard 45nm Penryn processor.
But new Intel processors did make a debut in the refresh of the MacBook Air. Instead of the Small-Form-Factor (SFF) 65-nanometer Merom chips, Apple has gone with with the more advanced 45-nanometer Penryn SSF processor. Penryn chips typically boast either 3MB or 6MB of cache memory versus the 2MB or 4MB that the older mobile procesors offer. (Cache memory speeds performance.)
The MacBook Air has previously been criticised for overheating issues which caused the Air to slow itself down.