Banias, Intel's energy-efficient processor designed primarily for notebooks, will debut at three speeds when it arrives next year, sources say--but megahertz won't be its selling point.
Talk about going against the millions spent on the marketing war to create a suspect performance measure folks ;)
Banias, which is due in the first quarter of 2003, will come out at 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz and 1.6GHz, according to sources close to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. The chip will initially be targeted at "thin and light" notebooks and eventually be incorporated into all types of notebooks, into blade servers and likely even into small desktops. A 1.3GHz version may also come out.
Although Intel has already been touting the performance characteristics of the chip, it will have to overcome a marketplace obstacle that it helped create: buyers who judge a chip by its clock speed. Clock speed is measured in megahertz. At 1.6GHz, Banias will be far slower in terms of raw speed than Pentium 4 notebook chips, which will hit 2.2GHz in the fourth quarter of this year. Mobile Celerons for the budget crowd already run at 1.2GHz.
"They've got good performance, but they can't sell it on megahertz," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
"It's going to be interesting," said a source at a PC manufacturer.
Like Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and other competing chips, Banias' performance will actually be better than its numbers might indicate because it will complete more work per clock cycle than the Pentium 4, according to Intel and other sources.
News source: ZDNet
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