June 20, 2000

Intel, the world's major chipmaker introduced a line of five news microprocessors at a press briefing in San Francisco on June 19, presided over by Frank Spindler, vice president of Intel and general manager of its mobile group. The line includes three types especially designed with mobile computer users in mind, requesting a better endurance on a given battery capacity.

The low power devices, called mobile Celerons, run at 500, 600 and 650 MHz, while the news Pentium III types run at clock speeds of 600 and 750 MHz.

Spindler was mum on revealing on precisely how much the new processors would add to the endurance of a battery, as power consumption of a notebook computer is not only dependent on the microprocessor itself but also on other factors, he said.

However, the Pentium III with 600 MHz clock speed has been designed to reduce its power consumption when the processor does not handle any data and will draw less then one watt of power on the average. Also targeted at the low power portable computer market is the 500 MHz Celeron with a power consumption of less than 2 watts on the average.

The new line seems to have been developed in order to compete against Transmeta Corp., an upstart chip maker which attracted attention when it introduced its Crusoe line of chips, claiming to approach the goal of an all-day battery endurance for notebook computers earlier in the year. Transmeta claims that their Crusoe chips run full computer operations at or below one watt of power consumption, while asserting that it's competitor Intel specifies the power consumption with 80% of the processor idle.

Intel already announced its "Speedstep" technology in January, which enables its mobile CPU to reduce its clock speed when the portable computer switches to battery power after being disconnected from the mains.

At the press briefing, prices for the new Intel processors were quoted from US$ 134 for the 500 MHz Celro to US$ 562 for the 750 MHz Pentium III at 1.000 pcs. As the new processors were shipped to the market for more than a month, notebook computers utilizing them should be available from Intel customers like NEC, Compaq, Dell and Sony, Spindler said.