Notebooks conquer power-hungry Pentium II
"We are still getting over three hours of battery life using the new processor," said Donnie Oliphant, product marketing manager for Dell Computer Corp. at Intel's announcement.
But there is some "degradation in battery life," Oliphant said. He stressed that users would still be able to work 3 hours and 10 minutes on a single battery, down from 3 hours and 45 minutes with the Dell's (DELL) previous Pentium (with MMX technology) computers.
Intel Corp. (INTC) unveiled its Pentium II processor for mobile PCs on Thursday at its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. The new processor is initially being offered at 233MHz and 266MHz speeds and comes with a closely coupled 512KB L2 cache.
Power-hungry processor
According to Oliphant, Dell's testing found its notebooks' battery life reduced by 10 to 15 percent by the new processor. A fair tradeoff for the 10 to 35 percent gain in performance cited by Intel using a variety of benchmarks.
Other PC makers agreed:
"We had already optimized our laptop PCs for the Pentium II," said Christopher Abate, a group manager for Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. "We only saw a 20-minute reduction in battery life."
Toshiba also displayed notebook computers based on the new chip, as did IBM Corp. (IBM), Gateway 2000 Inc. (GTW), Packard Bell NEC Inc., Hewlett-Packard Inc. (HWP), Compaq Computer Corp. (CPQ) and others.
Same process, more transistors
It comes as no surprise that Intel's latest mobile market entry is a bit of a power hog.
The newest Pentium II processor uses the same manufacturing process as the 200MHz and 233MHz Pentium MMX processors, code-named Tillamook, that Intel announced in September.
Yet the Pentium II uses far more transistors -- and transistors require power.
"It was a challenge to make the laptops power-efficient," said Taia Ergueta, marketing manager of HP's mobile computing division. "We've done a lot of additional work (including in software) on power management."
The Pentium II for mobile PCs uses from 6.8 to 8.6 watts depending on the clock speed and whether additional memory is included in the package. The mobile Pentium processor, on the other hand, only required 5.3 watts.