Don't expect a low-voltage Pentium 4
Source: CNet News
Although Intel spent considerable energy in 2000 and 2001 devising low-energy versions of its Pentium III chip for slim notebooks, it won't do the same with the Pentium 4, company executives said Wednesday.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker next week will release the first version of the Pentium 4 for notebooks, according to sources. The chip will be available in both the 7- to 8-pound desktop replacement notebooks as well as the 4- to 5-pound "thin-and-light" notebooks that are taking over the industry.
The company, however, won't try to fit the chip into the smallest, thinnest notebooks on the market, which require chips that consume an average of a watt or less of power.
Instead, it will continue to use the low- and ultralow-voltage Pentium III chips for this market and then replace them with Banias, an energy-efficient chip coming in the first half of 2003.
"We have no plans to have a low-power or ultralow-power version of the Pentium 4-M," Don McDonald, director of mobile marketing at Intel, said at the Intel Developer Forum, a four-day convention here.
Intel's decision not to completely diversify the Pentium 4 to some degree serves as a harbinger of what will likely be a lengthy and inexorable conversion within the company's mobile processor line.
