There's promise for UMPCs yet

The first half was a rehash of the older stuff, you can get the good parts here, but the second half was where the fun was.

They started out by admitting that Cantiga exists, and that it will be a good thing. I happen to agree, and Intel's claims of greater than 25% performance gains don't seem all that far fetched. DDR3 and 45 nanometre mobile Core CPUs will be a good thing.

From there Dadi took two steps backward for every step forward. Intel claim's the problems around G965 drivers are due to them not running Windows MeII well. Wow, not starting now, I thought it was about missing functionality and gaming. Please stop with the elephant ignoring and dead horse beating guys, I want to move onto something else as well.

Luckily my pleas went unheard, and one of the guys it put on its 'G965 love-in' video was from Valve. The problem? Well, the game that valve makes, Half-Life II, from the HDR short to Episode I and certainly the upcoming Episode II don't work on G965. Yup, it blew it up horribly, the HDR demo doesn't have water, and it has driver problems so bad it is unplayable. This is an Intel driver problem, not Valve's. Sigh.

From there it was on to renaming. You already know about Centrino Pro and Duo, but you probably didn't hear about Shirley Peak and Echo Peak. Those are what were known as Shiloh and Ebron, and what was known as Windigo is now known as dead, but Intel didn't say that.

Shirley Peak is Wi-Fi with iAMT for mobile vPro support, and Echo Peak is Wi-Fi plus WiMAX on the radio. We at The INQ expect another exciting name change for these parts before the next IDF, with any luck you will hear about the Wendy's and Burger King radios soon, peaks are far to controversial for middle America.

At this point, I was contemplating swallowing my tongue and choking to death, but things took a turn for the better, much better. New hardware, new form factors, and most importantly, a real UMPC breakthrough.

The new chip is called Silverthrone, it is a new CPU that goes along with the Poulsbo chipset to form the Menlo Park platform. This is going to be the first step in making UMPCs that are not a running joke. This will be a machine - think Tolapai with graphics.

If it can get power consumption down to the watts level instead of 10+, give or take a little, it has a chance of making a UMPC that will actually have a battery life longer than a P4 laptop. This is a very good thing.

The other breakthrough requires a little history. Every attempt at UMPCs to date have had fates that made them long for flaming deaths. Most of this was due to Microsoft and its insistence on cramming a middling OS onto a platform that it just was not suited for. The screen was too small, it sucked batteries running services that you can't turn off, and in general, it stunk.

The launch of the Origami platform at CeBIT 2006 was greeted with curious bemusement by most hacks, and it turned into the literal version of ROFL when we learned that Microsoft was indeed not joking. This year they Continued the deceased equine aggression with the launch of Vistagami, a case study in how to make something so awful no one wanted it in the first place quite a bit worse. This is a great success in MS terms.

With that in mind, Intel did the one thing that has a chance to save the whole concept, it threw Microsoft out. Yup, there will be Ubuntu and Red Flag Linux on Silverthorn UMPCs! Suddenly the expensive flop with a short battery life becomes a possible contender. It is amazing what a little total hardware and software change can do for a PC.

We will have to see what Intel comes out with in Q2, maybe. but there is serious light at the end of the tunnel. If you are a fan of things that work right, keep an eye one this space, Q2 2008 has become a lot more interesting. µ