Intel's Napa Wireless Platform Promises More with Less

By John Hazard and John G. Spooner
December 14, 2005

NEW YORK—Intel Corp. is touting its next mobile platform, dubbed Napa, as another major milestone in notebook PC history.

At a session for reporters and business analysts here Tuesday, Erik Reid, product marketing director at Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, stood Yonah—the chip maker's first dual-core mobile Pentium processor—and Napa next to such advances as flat-panel displays and the chip maker's first Centrino chip bundle, which helped to jump-start the trend of pairing notebooks and wireless.
Intel claims the latest notebook technology stands to boost average performance 68 percent beyond that of its current Sonoma platform, which includes its single-core Pentium M, while reducing power consumption an average of 28 percent, extending battery life beyond the 5-hour mark, Reid said. Napa also improves wireless bandwidth and can help cut the size of a notebook by 30 percent versus today's machines, the Santa Clara, Calif., company said.

Thus, for businesses, Napa will make for smaller, lighter notebooks with stronger performance, both in the form of wireless networking and the ability to multitask, Reid said.

But Intel appears most excited about the advance in power consumption, enabled by the dual-core Yonah chip. The Napa platform will consume about 3 watts of power on average, compared with about 4 watts consumed by the leading competitors, according to Intel's product specifications.

The chip benefits from a two-pronged assault on power usage, cutting amps by completing tasks faster and employing a new feature termed Dynamic Power Coordination, which allows its two cores to be power-managed independently, making it possible for one core to shut down while the other performs the heavy lifting.

Yonah also benefits from a shared cache or on-board pool of memory that holds data close to a processor core for quicker access. Dubbed Smart Cache, the design element allows one processor core to access the chip's entire 2MB Level 2 cache, Intel has said.

Microprocessor Advances

The Smart Cache is important to performance, allowing one core to store as much data as it can in the cache. The feature is also a key part of power management, as a single core can access the entire cache when the other is shut down, while running on battery, the company has said.

Intel first launched Centrino in 2003, and in early 2005 it updated the platform to include a higher-performance version of its Pentium M and mobile chip set.

Those advances contributed to a speedy adoption of wireless notebook computing by business users, and Intel executives expect Napa to accelerate the already growing adoption of mobile notebook technology when it arrives in January, Reid said.

"Trends predicted in 2003 for 2007 are already being surpassed today, and we expect it to accelerate more," he said. "We have a brand-new microprocessor, all delivering more capabilities with longer battery life. And there are new capabilities evolving every day that will the tax system further. Now you won't have to compromise, you won't have to wait for adoption."

Source: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1901460,00.asp

Will Intel's Napa chip run Apple laptop?

By Dean Takahashi

Mercury News

Intel announced Tuesday that its new line of chips will be built into more than 230 new laptop computers coming in 2006, making them much better at running music, movies and other digital media.

But it wouldn't say a word about whether that includes the laptop creating the most buzz, expected from its new marquee customer, Apple Computer.

The new laptops are based on Intel's new Napa platform that will enable the biggest upgrade in two years for portable technology. An Apple laptop with the technology could address the pent-up demand among the Macintosh faithful who have been disappointed with Apple laptops that run on Power PC chips. Apple said this year it would switch to Intel by mid-2006.

The Napa-based computers have a microprocessor chip, dubbed Yonah, that has two processing brains on a single chip. It is Intel's first dual-core laptop microprocessor and can perform 30 percent to 68 percent faster on software programs compared with single-core chips.

Napa computers will also be as much as 30 percent smaller and consume 28 percent less battery power than current Intel-based laptops, said Keith Kressen, an Intel mobile marketing director.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said the new laptops will be much better at running digital media, from music to movies, and they will be ready to support Microsoft's feature-rich Windows Vista operating system coming in late 2006.

``It's going to push people toward upgrading,'' he said.

A number of analysts expect Apple to introduce its first Intel-based laptop with the new Napa technology at its Macworld trade show in January.

Meanwhile, Intel also provided more details about the Viiv brand of home desktop computers that its customers will launch in the first quarter. Charlotte Lambrecht, a digital home marketing manager at Intel, said that Viiv computers will launch in nine countries initially and bring together a set of hardware, software and services that make it easier for consumers to enjoy digital entertainment in the home.

The Viiv computers will use Intel's dual-core microprocessors, as well as technologies for automatically converting video into the right format and protecting content from being illegally copied.

The Viiv computers will connect easily to other consumer devices such as networked TV sets, TV set-top boxes, connected DVD players and other gadgets. Intel said that Viiv-labeled devices will appear in the second half of the year, with the label meaning they will work properly with Viiv computers.

Many home computers running Microsoft's ``media center edition'' of Windows can already be operated in the living room with remote controls. But Eric Kim, chief marketing officer at Intel, said big entertainment content companies that have been sitting on the sidelines thus far will launch their content -- TV shows, movies, music, games and other software -- on Viiv PCs in January.

Just as Apple's iPod motivated music companies to make their songs available on portable devices, Kim said the Viiv computers would cause ``a number of major content players who have been sitting on the sidelines to come into the picture.''

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/13404030.htm