Intel to increase lead over AMD on notebooks, claim

Dancing around the floor so fast that our primitive camera only caught a blur, Eden said that future generations of Intel's mobile chips will increase their lead over the company that must not be named, its competitor, also known as AMD.

Our camera has so much latency and he moves so fast we only caught Mooly in a blur, sorry about that. He said that Intel had planned things presuming that AMD's Barcelona would be the core for the competition's notebook range, but instead it's based on a variant of the Turion, which makes him and the Intel mobility team much happier.

Eden took the argument to the floor when asked about the performance/battery life trade off. He asked what the optimal state of a mobile CPU is. We thought the optimal stage was "off", but Andreas Stiller of c't gave the answer that suited Mooly best - sleeping is the right answer.

He then said that was true of his wife too, which we thought was a trifle cavalier.

Future generation LV and ULV notebook chips will be redesigned on a smaller package, he said. They'll support more USB and S-ATA ports.

We're pleased to say the little chips Mooly had in a little case moved much slower than he did - here's two pix. We're not entirely sure what all of them do but they are very very small, we assure you.

Intel produces a fresh generation of microprocessors every year, but he admitted that large enterprises didn't want to change their systems that fast. They would standardise on a system and Intel would keep up with them - probably as long as four years or perhaps more.

Future gen notebooks would include support for 3G, WiMAX and GPS although, he said, there are technical challenges to deal with all that RF flying into one little ultra-slim machine.

Next year, he said, the leading OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) would include solid state disks (SSDs) in all their leading notebooks. They offered the advantage of fast boot and read/write, but also had the advantage that machine failures would be less, because people insisted carrying around notebooks and that put stress on mechanical hard drives.

Fuel cells are still just in an experimental stage. No one at Intel said three years ago that fuel cells were close to completion he said. Intel still regards them as still in the experimental stage. He's quite right. Intel showed us a fuel cell four years ago which it then said will provide 150 watts battery capacity two years down the line. µ