Innovation
Thursday
Thursday 20/03/2003We're still getting new Centrino-based notebooks here and they're still benchmarking very nicely, thank you. In fact, as gossip at Mike Magee's silicon scandal sheet The Inquirer points out, the Pentium M is such a good chip that it raises doubts about the future of the Pentium 4.
Thursday 20/03/2003
We're still getting new Centrino-based notebooks here and they're still benchmarking very nicely, thank you. In fact, as gossip at Mike Magee's silicon scandal sheet The Inquirer points out, the Pentium M is such a good chip that it raises doubts about the future of the Pentium 4. For while there are plenty of reasons why a chip could be fantastic for a desktop but naff for a notebook, the reverse is rarely true. If a chip performs well while taking little power, it might just as well do it on your desk as on your lap. Clock for clock, the Pentium M outperforms the Pentium 4. It does the same watt for watt. And with the trend on the desktop going away from big boxes, you really want as little heat as possible inside your tiny case -- less fan noise, the possibility of built-in uninterruptible power supplies, all that sort of thing. Intel hates this sort of talk. It continued to deny that there was any point in putting a Pentium 4 into a notebook, even while companies were responding to customer demand and doing just that. It'll continue to argue -- and back up with massively disparate pricing -- that you want a P4 for the desktop and a Pentium M for your laptop. Nonetheless, when the market decides it doesn't want to do what Intel wants -- still holding out for that Itanium? -- it's only a matter of time before sanity percolates through even the densest of marketing departments. Not that Intel has the densest of marketing departments, of course. Anybody who can come up with the surrealist splendour of Centrino branding is clearly touched by genius. Or something.
We're still getting new Centrino-based notebooks here and they're still benchmarking very nicely, thank you. In fact, as gossip at Mike Magee's silicon scandal sheet The Inquirer points out, the Pentium M is such a good chip that it raises doubts about the future of the Pentium 4. For while there are plenty of reasons why a chip could be fantastic for a desktop but naff for a notebook, the reverse is rarely true. If a chip performs well while taking little power, it might just as well do it on your desk as on your lap. Clock for clock, the Pentium M outperforms the Pentium 4. It does the same watt for watt. And with the trend on the desktop going away from big boxes, you really want as little heat as possible inside your tiny case -- less fan noise, the possibility of built-in uninterruptible power supplies, all that sort of thing. Intel hates this sort of talk. It continued to deny that there was any point in putting a Pentium 4 into a notebook, even while companies were responding to customer demand and doing just that. It'll continue to argue -- and back up with massively disparate pricing -- that you want a P4 for the desktop and a Pentium M for your laptop. Nonetheless, when the market decides it doesn't want to do what Intel wants -- still holding out for that Itanium? -- it's only a matter of time before sanity percolates through even the densest of marketing departments. Not that Intel has the densest of marketing departments, of course. Anybody who can come up with the surrealist splendour of Centrino branding is clearly touched by genius. Or something.