Intel Says New Mobile Chip Equals High-End Pentium 4

Notebook PCs based on the most powerful version of Intel's Centrino mobile technology now perform just as well as desktop PCs with Intel's fastest Pentium 4 processors, according to an Intel executive. During this week's launch of the Sonoma Centrino technology, Mooly Eden, vice president and director of marketing of Intel's new Mobility Group, demonstrated a video game on a new Sonoma laptop and compared its performance to that of the same video game running on a Pentium 4 desktop PC. The Sonoma design contains the Pentium M processor, the new Alviso chip set with support for the PCI Express interconnect technology and DDR2 (Double Data Rate 2) memory, and an Intel Pro/Wireless chip. Intel brands the package as Centrino mobile technology.

In the demonstration, the performance of a Sonoma system with a 2.13-GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB of memory, and the Alviso chip set was said to be comparable to that of a desktop system carrying a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with hyperthreading, 1GB of memory, and the Grantsdale chip set (which also supports PCI Express and DDR2). Intel had previously compared the high end of its notebook technology to the midrange of its desktop technology. This is an important milestone for Intel as it plans to eventually make the Pentium M processor the backbone of its chip designs, according to sources. Intel has not publicly confirmed such plans.

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