Intel Monday says it is now shipping its flagship chip – the Pentium 4 – for use in laptops and other mobile PCs.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip making giant says the mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor-M is great at speeding up video and other CPU intensive processes. The chip only uses two watts of power, which makes it perfect for thin-and-light systems.
The processor is expected to compete with Transmeta‘s Crusoe chips and the Athlon 4 and Duron mobile chips made by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
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At speeds of 1.7 and 1.6 GHz, the P4-M is designed using Intel’s new NetBurst Micro-Architecture. The form consists of a 400 MHz processor system bus, Hyper Pipelined Technology, an Execution Trace Cache, Rapid Execution Engine, and 144 Streaming SIMD instructions (SSE2). It also includes a 512k on-die L2 cache.
The company also unveiled its mobile Intel 845chipset family (the 845MP and 845MZ), supporting double data rate (DDR) memory.
Intel says its 845MP offers external AGP 4X graphics support, a 400MHz processor system bus, and DDR 266 MHz SDRAM for up to 1GB memory support. The new chipset also supports Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology, Deeper Sleep Alert State, a low-power graphics power management mode and an internal timer that automatically turns off the chipset clock when the chipset is inactive.
In addition, the Intel 845MP chipset is designed using Intel’s most advanced Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array packaging, supports 6 USB ports and supports Intel’s I/O Hub Architecture providing a high bandwidth pipe that delivers fast communications and reduces latency time for I/O operations.
The 845MZ version is expected later this year.
Both the P4-M and the Intel 845MP chipset use Intel “SpeedStep” and “Deeper Sleep Alert State” technologies. Deeper Sleep allows the processor to operate as low as 1 volt, and reach power levels as low as half a watt — even while running software applications.
The mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M also supports an enhanced version of the Intel Mobile Voltage Positioning.
Intel Mobile Platforms Group vice president and general manager Anand Chandrasekher should know about the new chips. He demonstrated the processor’s performance with the first public demo of a soft decode of 1080i (HDTV quality) content on a notebook PC at the Intel Developer Forum last week.
“The introduction of Pentium 4 processor-M brings to mobile computing the performance users have come to expect from the Pentium 4 processor,” says Chandrasekher. “Together with the Intel 845 chipset and advanced power management technologies, this delivers an optimal balance of high performance and long battery life for today’s mobile PCs.”
Intel is selling the chips in 1,000-unit quantities. The 1.7 and 1.6 GHz are priced at $508 and $401 respectively. In 1,000 unit quantities the Intel 845MP chipset is $43.00.
