Pentium 4 Notebooks

[Trevor Schell]

Hi!,

Looking around the net all I can come across is
Notebook computers that offer up to PIII 1.2 GZ processing.

I have yet to see a P4 offering.
Any idea if something is in the works and a date when they would be available?.

Thanks,




Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

[JonMarsh]

Hi Trevor,

They are on Intel's Roadmaps, but not until the 0.13 micron process is in full swing- as opposed to "debug", which is it's current status.

The P4 is hardly an ideal notebook processor at present. For a given level of performance, it requires a higher clock rate and considerably more memory bandwidth than the PIII or Athlon. DDR Ram and RDRAM both suck down more power than SDRAM. Power is the enemy of notebooks.

Do you ever wonder why Intel is selling the 0.13 micron Tualitin PIII's into the "Blade" style single rack servers, running at 1.3 GHz, with 512KB of L2 cache, but isn't selling those into Desktops? Can you spell "marketing disaster", if people realize that a 1.3 GHz PIII out performs a 1.5 to 1.7 GHz P4? It's bad enough they're fighting that battle with AMD, re the Athlon XP, but to be shown up by their own last generation processor would raise too many questions in even the unwashed public's mind.

And with the memory bandwidth hog that P4 is, is it no wonder that they've been dragging their feet about bringing out the Brookdale chipset with SDRAM support? Athlon's and PIII's take a little bit of a hit in performance going from DDR or RDRAM to PC133 SDRAM; the P4 takes a much bigger hit, due to it's prefetch architecture.

Intel, at the introduction of the P4, published some benchmarks showing how the P4 was such a whiz in the memory bandwidth performance; how running a specific scientific benchmark, a 1.4 GHz P4 was sucking down almost twice the memory bandwidth as a 1 GHz PIII. What they didn't show was that it was actually only about 5% faster in performing the benchmark, while using about twice the memory bandwidth. With the majority of current memory technologies, this is not the hallmark of outstanding processor design. Intel optimized it around RDRAM, because of their licensing arrangments with RAMBUS. That doesn't make it a very practical notebook CPU in it's current form. (BTW, the P4 is about twice the chip size as a PIII or Athlon, too, so Intel is taking it in the shorts regarding manufacturing costs).

I wouldn't be looking for this chip in a high performance laptop- at least not if you'd like that machine to be able to play a whole DVD just on battery power.

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Trevor Schell]

Jon,
Great explanation and that does make so much sense.
Never thought about the power that you would need to keep the P4 alive.
I had been looking for a new Notebook computer but did not want to invest with possibility of a new processor in a short while.
One probably would not need much more that a 1 GZ with a decent graphics chip combined.
Sounds like the P4 would be a step back.

Thanks for the help!.




Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

[Bing Fung]

Nicely presented as always Jon!




Bing

[JonMarsh]

I'm blushing guys, cut that out!

Seriously, Intel is proceeding on this front, regardless; now their roadmap shows the 845MP mobile chip set supporting DDR only (200MHz)(RAMBUST, I guess!) still scheduled for some time in the first quarter! Now, to me, looking at what balance of performance you need in a laptop, this seems silly, compared with the performance you can get with an optimized PIII core at 0.13 micron. Notebooks and desktops have different missions and different requirements; the performance advantage of SSE2, compared with the weaknesses in conventional integer and FP, plus the power and memory bandwidth issues, make it less desirable in my mind.

But history will settle the issue one way or another!

So, will Itanium laptops be next?

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....