Intel claims notebook batteries will last a day

CHIP FIRM Intel is claiming that by 2010 your notebook battery will last a whole day. And it is also claiming that that's good for the environment, according to documents seen by the INQUIRER.

It doesn't say exactly how it plans to do this, and nor does it give a definition of a day. Yesterday was the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere and in parts of Scandinavia the day lasts no time at all.

We think Intel means eight hours, but that's not far off being attainable long before 2010, so perhaps it really does mean 24 hours a day, which would be a breakthrough, indeed.

The claim comes in the run up to its launch of the Sonoma notebook platform and the introduction of other notebook chipsets early in the New Year.

The new chipsets will come with additional wireless features, either good old 54 Mbit 2200BG or new 2915ABG. Sonoma is also supported by Pentium M CPUs clocked up to 2.13 GHz and using a 533MHz front side bus. It's the same Dothan CPU based on 90 nanometre marchitecture with 2MB cache.

Sonoma will bring DDR 2, PCI Express marchitecture, S-ATA drives and better audio to Pentium M laptops. It will feature Azalia-like high definition audio.

All this comes in the second half of January and it sounds like a major notebook change to me. It will improve pretty much all but battery life. µ

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