Notebooks to slim down in New Year

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will offer improved performance while continuing the trend toward lightweight machines with relatively long battery life, said Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Platforms Group at Intel.

The bundle will pair slightly faster Pentium M chips, including a new 2.13GHz Pentium M, with a new chipset code-named Alviso. The new chipset offers a speedier 533MHz front-side bus and comes with higher-performance graphics built in. Alviso, whose debut Intel delayed until January, will also add support for DDR2 RAM and PCI Express, a speedier connection for add-in cards.

It will also pack in high-definition audio, which Intel says offers better sound quality and enables noise-canceling array microphones for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) should PC makers choose to add such microphones to a system.

PCI Express will allow PC makers to fit their high-end Sonoma notebooks with graphics cards that contain the latest graphics chips from companies such as ATI Technologies.

"From a consumer standpoint, Sonoma has a ton of goodies," said Chandrasekher, referring to the performance and graphics improvements.

"You'll see some cool 15.4-inch wide-screen designs with four-plus hours of battery life, which will be great gaming machines," Chandrasekher said.

Weighty issues
A number of factors, including screen size, determine a notebook's heft. However, Sonoma systems will weigh at least a pound or two less than similarly fitted machines using desktop Pentium 4 processors. Thanks to smaller chassis and the ability to throw out some extra cooling parts, most consumer systems will shrink to between 6.5 pounds and 7 pounds when fitted with 15.4-inch screens. Larger 17-inch-screen models are likely to start at a little more than 7 pounds, McDonald said.

Thus, the higher performance of Sonoma-based Centrino systems, coupled with the availability of Celeron M--a low-priced alternative to the Pentium M that shares its low-power characteristics--will weed out many desktop Pentium 4 notebooks during 2005. AMD notebooks are expected to follow a similar trend, a company representative said, as the chipmaker offers more low-power Mobile Athlon 64 chips in the first half of 2005. The representative declined to offer additional details.

Heavyweight notebooks won't go away completely, however, as desktop chips can still offer more performance than the latest Pentium Ms and mobile Athlon 64s. Manufacturers are likely to continue building those machines for computer game enthusiasts and others.

"The gamer, the enthusiast, someone doing Web page development or video editing--they don't really care about an extra pound or so if they're going to eek out some more performance," Kaye said. "We think that (the desktop processor notebook) segment is going to be there at least through 2005."

The desktop Pentium 4 will stick around in some notebooks, Chandrasekher also conceded.

But he predicts that a forthcoming version of Centrino dubbed "Napa"--the follow-up to Sonoma that includes the dual-core "Yonah" Pentium M chip--may nearly wipe the Pentium 4 out in 2006.

Fancy new features
Some notebooks are likely to include fancy features such as phones that slide out and secondary screens. Last year, Intel touted a prototype for Sonoma notebooks called Florence that included a 17-inch screen, a built-in camera, a phone handset that pops out, a detachable keyboard and a handle. There is no guarantee that notebook makers will adopt these features, but Intel generally allows its customers to use its designs for free.

Another upcoming feature for notebooks is the Extended Mobile Architecture, or EMA. This involves adding a secondary screen on the outside of the notebook. The notebook stays in the sleep state, but people can monitor what's landing in their e-mail box. Later, the EMA window could be used to monitor phone calls or messaging traffic. Intel has been noodling with EMA concepts in its labs since 2001.

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that consumer notebook shipments will jump almost 20 percent to just over 20 million in 2005--nearly half of the worldwide notebook forecast of about 55 million units for the year.

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.

[Llib Setag]

Thin+Power "Future" is here TODAY!

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/
-Eyes wide open in Seattle-
[Unix/Mac/WinPC User]

An Apple has Power?

Apple Power = Oxymoron.

Did the Macs finally get pass the 1ghz speed yet? And this is not even mentioning the lack of software. Wait Wait. Don't tell me, it can "emulate" Windows and run Windows programs. If I'd wanted Windows progs, I would have bought a Cheaper, Faster Windows laptop. Oh yeah, I did.