Re: IBM Pentium laptops

[ychou (Sean Chou)]

>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.

That's interesting since Midwest Micro has a Pentium 90 notebook
out.  I don't know it's performance but it's got an L2 cache, is
PCI, and 64-bit.  It also includes an IR port as well as 16550UART,
EPP, etc.  Looks very packed.

Now, we know Midwest Micro didn't make this machine, but who did?
I don't see any other ads for any Pentium notebooks yet.

And also, Toshiba has a Pentium machine coming out.  It could be
that Intel is still trying to play their low-power notebook and
get rid of their CPUs somehow game -- relegate a lower power
CPU to notebooks (say the 75MHz) and make more of a gradient...

I'm really getting sick of Intel.

>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.

Yes, but like the first 486s, the first Pentium notebooks will
still run rings around current 486 notebooks.  Desktop 486s still
run rings around notebook 486s.

>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.

Who cares what they think.  Just put the damn things out and let the
market decide! ;)

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

Bah, I'd rather see the 603+ chip running OS/2! :)  Or even MacOS.
---
Sean Chou / schou@uiuc.edu / CompuServe 73672,2111