IBM Pentium laptops

[george@cs.nps.navy.mil (Robert George)]

There was a big article in EE Times about the upcomming Pentium laptops. 
The general gist of the article was that they are horrible!  The Pentium
Intel is intending for laptops are Tab-bonded -- they are a 3.3V P5
die mounted exposed on a polymer substrate.  Only megalithic corporations
like IBM have the facilities to manufacture Tab-bonded sytems.  Even
Compaq was interviewed in the article as questioning whether they would
invest the funds necessary.

The other aspect of this is that the Pentium still draws power like a
heat gun, even in its 3.3V incarnation.  In other words, the Pentium
_must_ be cooled, especially in a laptop where there is no air 
circulation.  I've heard rumors that IBM's solution to this problem is
to use a liquid cooling pad mounted on top of the P5 Tab package which
circulates the cooling fluid out to heat fins on the back of the laptop.

To make matters worse, a Pentium will have lousy performance without
an L2 cache.  The static RAM used in caches draws almost as much power
as a Pentium chip (you know, on the order of an electric freight train).
The bottom line is that the first Pentium laptops will be in the same
situation as the first 486 laptops -- battery life in minutes, lousy
performance, and overheating problems.

On another note, I've been hoping for a higher resolution LCD panel.  The
engineers that design these systems said that text display in 800x600 on
a 9.5 inch panel is so small as to be unreadable.  The 10.4 inch display
is marginal, but only available in large quantities as dual scan passive.

I have heard other rumors that in fact the 700 series will have an 
available internal CD-ROM, as well as integrated stereo speakers.

I'd rather see IBM spend their time making a PowerPC 603-based laptop
which runs Windoze :)


spoke with some e

Robert George
(george@cs.nps.navy.mil)