Intel Readies Three Laptop Chips

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December 09, 1998 (2:39 PM EST)

By Andy Patrizio,

Intel is taking its multiple CPU strategy to the laptop market, introducing three individual chips in an attempt to stratify the market, just as it did for desktop and server machines.

Instead of offering chips for the high end and low end, like it did with the Xeon and Celeron, Intel is aiming its laptop chips down. The Pentium II chip will remain the top end of the mobile-computing product line, and Intel will boost performance to 366 MHz in the first quarter of 1999. Now, top of the line laptops run only as high as 300 MHz.

Intel is also introducing Celeron-based laptops, which will use the pin-based design of the old Pentium chip.

But perhaps most surprising is Intel's decision to release a new Pentium MMX chip for the mobile market. The 300-MHz chip will also be available in the first quarter.

But there won't be a broad rollout of Pentium laptops, according to an Intel spokeswoman. The updated Pentium is for laptop vendors that have leftover inventory of Pentium-ready computers and want to sell off the remaining hardware but need a speed boost to be competitive with the Pentium II.

One chip-industry watcher predicts a short life span for the new Pentium. "I can't figure out why that product makes any sense at all," said Keith Deifendorff, editor-in-chief of The Microprocessor Report. "It's not really a strategic thing, and I expect it to go away as fast as they can make it."

The Celeron-based notebook line will be Intel's offering for low-end notebooks, which should sell for well below $2,000. Intel is already facing competition from its chief rival, Advanced Micro Devices, which has a mobile version of its K6 chip on the market.

The move will protect Intel's margins in low-cost notebooks, Deifendorff said, but the laptop market hasn't been subject to the low-cost mania gripping the desktop market.

"I think that's partially because the largest part of the notebook market is the corporate sector and that's less price-sensitive," he said. "They want the bigger screen and more memory, and that costs money."

However, with the cost of notebook components coming down enough that vendors can build a decent notebook that retails for about $1,000, the market will start to grow, and Intel will be there with Celeron.

Pentium lives on in another way. Intel said Wednesday that it will license the Pentium processor design to the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in a royalty-free deal. The government wants to develop radiation-proof chips for space and defense purposes.

The agreement will save hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs and provide the government with a nearly tenfold increase in processing power over the highest-performing technology in use today, government officials said.