PENTIUM PORTABLES ARE ON HORIZON. (INTEL DEVELOPS PENTIUM MICROPROCESSORS TARGETED FOR NOTEBOOK COMPUTERS)

By Neal Boudette
310 words
16 May 1994
PC Week
37
English
Copyright Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1994

Corporate buyers longing for a boost in portable processing power can step up to the Pentium level by early 1995.

This fall Intel Corp. plans to release a 3.3-volt, 75MHz Pentium chip destined for notebooks that should debut at Comdex in November, Intel officials said last week.

"We think you'll see a lot of notebooks coming out with that chip in the first quarter of next year," said Curt Nichols, Pentium marketing manager in Santa Clara, Calif.

IBM Personal Computer Co., Compaq Computer Corp., and Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. are expected to be among the first to offer machines based on the chip, sources said.

IBM has already built prototypes of a Pentium-based ThinkPad, insiders said.

Some users running compute-intensive applications said they would be interested in Pentium portables if they are available at midrange prices.

"I'd like to get a notebook for my next computer, and I need as much performance as possible," said George Plesko, a researcher at Northeastern University, in Boston, whose massive economics models take several minutes to run on a 33MHz 486DX desktop. "But if you have to pay $5,000 or $6,000, that would probably put it out of range."

Most users, however, said Pentium notebooks reach well beyond their current needs. "DX4 notebooks are just coming out, and we really haven't even started looking at those, let alone Pentium portables," said Scott Martin, MIS specialist at Gannett Welsh & Kotler Inc., in Boston.

Analysts expect the 75MHz Pentium chip to be a clock-tripler, with an external bus running at 25MHz. "That would make sense because notebooks seem to be settling on a 25MHz bus," said Dean McCarron, an analyst at Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

ILLUSTRATION: table

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