Intel muddies mobile waters

Laptops based on Intel's new Mobile Pentium 4-M chip offer some advantages over Pentium III devices, but how compelling is the business case for standardising on the latest processor?

Intel's launch of the Mobile Pentium 4-M processor earlier this month leaves firms with a tricky choice regarding notebooks: standardise on last year's Mobile Pentium III-M, or move to the new chip.

The Pentium 4 offers many improvements beyond mere clock speed, but do they deliver real benefits to business users?

The launch of the Mobile Pentium 4-M came a full month earlier than many industry observers expected. Some have suggested this is Intel's response to the increasing number of manufacturers offering laptops based on desktop processors - so-called desknote systems.

Both the desktop and mobile Pentium 4 chips are now made using Intel's Northwood 0.13-micron technology, which lets chips work at lower voltages, generating less heat. But the desktop part is considerably cheaper than the mobile one, tempting manufacturers into using it in notebooks.

But the desktop Pentium 4 processor lacks the SpeedStep power-saving circuitry of the Mobile Pentium 4-M, and is designed to be used with larger heatsinks than would normally be fitted into notebooks. According to Intel, this could cause the chip to run hot and to trip its thermal protection circuitry, which reduces the clock speed considerably until the temperature returns to a safe level.

Intel's director of mobile marketing, Don MacDonald, warned that companies should be wary of buying desktop Pentium 4 chips in notebooks. "It would not be a smart move to buy them," he said.

"Although the machine might be labelled 1.7GHz, in reality it would throttle to speeds below that."

He added that users would only get the rated clock speed performance with a genuine notebook chip.

But even enterprise vendors such as Toshiba plan to ship notebooks with desktop Pentium 4s. Kenneth Chan, Toshiba's portable product manager, said that its 1.6GHz Satellite 1900 was carefully designed to avoid heat problems.

"It has a heatsink and fan, and the case is larger than most other notebooks," Chan said.

For some time, Intel has been campaigning to persuade firms that notebooks can replace desktop systems. Intel said that over 75 per cent of its employees use a notebook as their sole computer.

The chip giant's argument is that notebooks are now almost as powerful as desktops and just as easy to manage by IT staff, so they make more sense in productivity terms than systems tied to a desktop. The result is that the corporate notebook has become a desktop PC that can be carried from office to home, rather than a device for use while on the move.

But although Intel said the Pentium 4 family offers a 40 per cent performance increase over the Pentium III, most of the gains are in areas such as multimedia and graphics processing. For office productivity applications, performance gains are marginal or non-existent.

And the Mobile Pentium 4-M will not have things all its own way for long.

The next Intel mobile chip, codenamed Banias and due early next year, is slated to feature an extremely low-power design while providing high performance. Banias mobiles are expected to quickly supplant Mobile Pentium 4-M notebooks.

For IT buyers, the most sensible decision may be to delay replacing laptops until the Banias chip appears. Current Pentium III-based notebooks still offer more than adequate performance for the majority of business applications.