A moveable feast - Feature #36

It has been a while since we were able to dismiss notebook PCs as underpowered portable typewriters. Notebooks just keep getting closer to desktop systems in performance, while the once-exorbitant pricing becomes more realistic every year.

While notebooks are still well entrenched as a business tool, the big boom for manufacturers has been people choosing a notebook instead of a desktop PC. Now that pricing is less offensive than it once was, the small size and portability of notebooks are attractive to a huge range of users, which has led to notebooks now accounting for more sales than desktops.

Because the business traveller is no longer the main focus of notebook design, several fringe product segmentations have arisen. At the lightest end of the market sit the ultra portables. These are notebooks where the most important factor in design is minimising size and weight while maximising battery life. These machines are mainly based around ultra low voltage CPUs from Intel and Transmeta.

At the other end of the spectrum sits the desktop replacement. While these are still definitely notebooks, they are relatively heavy and are built with an emphasis on performance. This makes for incredibly powerful hardware but short battery life and they're best used when connected to mains power.

While there is no set notebook form factor, there are two major divergences from 'normal' notebook design that bear mentioning. The first is Microsoft's Tablet PC, which is essentially a notebook PC that replaces the normal input devices with an active digitiser pen. While the implementation of Tablet PC has been great, the uptake rate has been very low as people struggle to see any advantage over either normal notebook PCs or good old paper and pens.

The other rapidly exploding segment is a spin-off of the desktop replacement class. Dubbed 'widebooks', these have stemmed from the home theatre realm and sport wide screens for DVD playback. There has not been a huge penetration of these into the Australian market, as it is another product line that is being paired with Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition in supported regions.

While some technology spans across the entire notebook market, it is becoming more and more diversified. Hardware is now being developed that targets the power and performance requirements over the range of notebook uses, with the pace of technology increasing as portable computing continues to increase in popularity.

Processor tech
While the constant torrent of market-ese may get a little heavy, there is no doubt that Intel's Centrino initiative has been a success. Not only has the Pentium M CPU set new standards in battery life, pairing it with the Calexico 802.11b wireless LAN chip has driven wireless use to new levels.

At the moment Intel has Pentium M models based on the 0.13-micron Banias core running on a 400MHz FSB at speeds from 1.3GHz to 1.7GHz (with some slower low voltage models as well). The CPU features 32KB of L1 and 1MB of L2 cache and also supports the SSE2 instruction set found in the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 CPUs. The Banias core is due for an update in the next few months with a new core codenamed Dothan, which is constructed with the same 90 nanometre process technology as the desktop Prescott core -- using strained silicon and copper interconnects. Architecturally it is similar to Banias, but its 140 million transistors enable a doubling of L2 cache to 2MB. This is more of a core refresh than a new product, with the next generation of Centrino, codenamed Sonoma, not due until late 2004.

Intel recently changed the naming for its Pentium 4 for desktop replacements. Previously known as the Intel Mobile Pentium 4 Processor-M it is now officially the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor or the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor supporting HyperThreading Technology. Functionally identical to the desktop Pentium 4, this processor differs with the inclusion of power management and a lower operating voltage.

AMD has not had a strong presence in the notebook field; it has historically been almost impossible to find Athlon-based notebooks until a long time after launch. Rather than go down the path of Intel and Transmeta and construct a chip purely for mobile use, AMD has a mobile version of its Athlon 64 CPU ready to go, even though the only Athlon 64 notebooks currently on the market use desktop CPUs.

The mobile variant of the Athlon 64 differs only in the inclusion of AMD's battery extending PowerNow! Technology. AM's website states that the CPU is optimised to run as a desktop replacement, competing against the Mobile Pentium 4 rather than the Pentium M.

After languishing in obscurity for a while, and now Linus Torvald's free, Transmeta has recently announced the Efficeon . Like the previous 128-bit Crusoe processor, Efficeon is a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) that combines with Transmeta's code morphing software to squeeze long battery life and high performance out of the processor. Efficeon is a major update to the architecture. It is now a 256-bit core, allowing it to process twice the instructions per clock, which dramatically increases the efficiency of the processor and enables longer battery life on the ultra portable notebooks that it's destined to inhabit.

Wireless LAN
Running a wireless LAN for desktop PCs is a convenient option for cable haters, but it is in the notebook sphere that Wi-Fi really shines. If your notebook doesn't move around much you won't see the benefit, but as soon as you get on the road you'll start wondering how you did without it.

Despite what television may have you think, the world is not an overlapping series of wireless hotspots -- they are concentrated into areas where usage is high. Airports are now littered with people bashing away on the net, and laptop-wielding metrosexuals seems to be breeding inside every Starbucks in the continental US.

At the moment the most widely installed Wi-Fi technology is 802.11b.