Intel has unveiled its first 90-nanometer chips
designed for larger notebooks that offer greater performance but
with less mobility.
The three Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors - models 538, 532
and 518 - are also the second group of chips to come with Intel's
latest processor numbering system.
The company introduced the numbering system last month as a way
of communicating processor performance without Intel's traditional
focus on clock speed.
Intel's Pentium M processor for thin-and-light notebooks enjoys
a higher profile than the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 chip, but the two
products target at different segments of the notebook market.
The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 is designed for the
desktop-replacement category of notebooks, which has been very
popular among consumers more concerned with performance and price
than with weight and battery life.
The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 is based on the same 90-nanometer
Prescott core as Intel's desktop Pentium 4 processors. The 538, 532
and 518 chips run at 3.2GHz, 3.06GHz and 2.8GHz, and cost $294,
$234 and $202, respectively, in quantities of 1,000 units.
The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors have 1Mbytes of Level 2
cache, twice as much as older Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors, as
well as 13 new instructions that improve the performance of
multimedia applications.
The rest of the power increase is thought to come from current
leakage at the smaller dimensions of the 90-nanometer process
technology, analysts have said when discussing the Prescott
processors.
Power management features such as Intel's SpeedStep technology
are included with the mobile processors to help match the clock
speed of the processor with the requirements of a specific
application task, but notebooks with the processors will need to be
designed with the higher thermal output in mind.
Desktop replacement notebooks are generally equipped with
heavier heat shields than their thin-and-light counterparts because
of the extra heat dissipated by processors running at faster clock
speeds.
Intel also released a Celeron M processor for budget notebooks.
The Celeron M processor is based on the same architecture as the
Pentium M processor, but contains half as much cache. This makes
for a less expensive, therefore less powerful processor that costs
$134 in quantities of 1,000 units.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service