Intel majors on Centrino burst of speed

MR MOBILE AT THE Intel Corporation is Anand Chadrasekher, and he covered a fair bit of notebook ground at the Developers Forum here this morning.

In this view of the world, wireless enabled notebooks using the up and coming Banias (Pentium M) processor will stay awake for hours on a plane, and when you land, wherever it is in the world, it will automatically pick up a wi-fi signal and keep you working even when you're dog tired.

He estimates that the notebook market will continue to grow by 16% CAGR up to 2006, so this is obviously a lucrative hot spot for Intel to tune in to.

Chandraskher, abetted by IntelBrit Don McDonald, demonstrated a Pentium III-M, a Pentium 4M and a Pentium M all running simultaneously.

This showed what a power hog the Intel Pentium 4M is, while a Pentium III-M ran rather coolly, but at a much less clock frequency, of course. The Pentium M, in this demo a 1.6GHz baby, looked like it was performing in a pretty cool manner too.

Vendors just about to introduce Pentium Ms include Samsung, Asus, Toshiba and many others, said Chandraskeher.

He also showed a 12-inch wafer which he said included the next generation of the Pentium M processor, Dothan, which uses a 90 nanometer manufacturing method.

He said that there were some new developments, probably likely to hit the world next year, which would greatly extend notebook life.

Those include low temperature polysilicon displays which eat only three watts, and he also showed a fuel cell which would provide 150 watts battery capacity in just two years from now.

So will Centrino notebooks cost significantly more than current machines? Sources within Intel assure us that they won't, but the firm still has to properly position the three notebook CPUs against each other.

Rather than wait for Centrino, we decided to get a Pentium III-M machine running at 1.2GHz. Good price, nice configuration, and this is a lovely little chip, we think.

We've got pics of a lot of stuff from Burns and Chandrasekher's presentations this morning - we'll post them separately later today.