Re: "20 vendors for the 1 gig P3 didn't help the price much today..."
Nope - Kumar's Bash didn't help.
Speaking of 1 Gig Pentium III vendors - I'll bet you AMDroids are licking your chops to read this:
Notebook industry backs Intel's 1-GHz chip - avoiding the AMD Palomino No Show
By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
Mar 19, 2001 (10:34 AM)
URL: techweb.com
Intel Corp. officially launched its 1-GHz mobile Pentium III on Monday, but it seems almost everyone already has one.
According to Intel, the chip has been designed into approximately 16 notebooks from 12 manufacturers, some available today. Hewlett-Packard Co. even began selling its Pavilion N6395 in retail stores such as Best Buy on Sunday, March 18.
“This is a real launch with real products,” said Don MacDonald, director of marketing for the Mobile Platforms Group at Intel, Santa Clara, Calif. Intel also announced mobile versions of a 900-MHz Pentium III and 750-MHz Celeron.
As reported last Thursday, the notable feature of the new chip for Intel's customers isn't its speed, but its availability. Intel has “paper launched” products before, most notably the 1-GHz desktop Pentium III, without adequate quantities of the chips themselves.
The systems will be priced at around $2,500, a high-end niche that will appeal to those buyers looking to replace their desktop machines with new notebooks. “Inventory levels aren't huge for this, as you might expect,” said Bob Nitzberg, HP's notebook retail marketing manager for North America, in Palo Alto, Calif.
The launch also comes as one analyst firm, Mercury Research Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., questioned the “desktop-replacement” market the 1-GHz chip is addressing. In 2001, the firm estimates that 19.4 percent of all PCs shipped will be notebooks -- an increase of less than half a percentage point from 2000.
Still, MacDonald used a tried and true argument for buying a notebook using the new chip: investing into the future. “We think it's very important to buy up as much [of a] computing budget as you can because in two years you'll be using your notebook in many different ways,” he said.
The new 1-GHz mobile Pentium III operates at 1.7 volts, or 1.35Vwhen using the powered-down SpeedStep mode, when the chip runs at 700-MHz. The 1-GHz model consumes less than 2 watts when using the SpeedStep battery-optimized mode.
By itself, the 1-GHz mobile Pentium III costs $719 in 1,000-unit lots, about three times as much as the desktop version. The 900-MHz version costs $562, and the 750-MHz mobile Celeron costs $170.
Frank Spindler, general manager of the Mobile Platforms Group, said that the price difference factors in the SpeedStep technology, clock gating, and thermal constraints of the chip. “The requirements for the mobile CPU are very different than the desktop version,” he said.
The chip uses a 100-MHz front-side bus, slower than the desktop version's 133-MHz bus. Still, MacDonald did not describe the bus as a limit on the chip's performance, an argument Intel has applied before. A finer, 0.13-micron “Tualatin” Pentium III is expected later in the year, when faster bus speeds may be introduced.
Spindler also called conventional synchronous memory the “optimal solution for power and performance” when evaluating memories for notebook PCs.
OEMs described the chip as an important milestone for the computing industry, pointing out that Intel's notebook chips are still a year behind the speeds of their desktop counterparts.
Hewlett-Packard stole a march on perennial front-runner Dell Computer Corp. by making available finished Presario notebooks in retailers this past weekend. “We really optimized our supply chain,” Nitzberg said.
The two-spindle Pavilion N6395 features the 1-GHz chip, a 30-Gbyte hard drive, 15-inch display, and an ATI M1 mobile graphics chip for approximately $3,199. A corporate equivalent, the Omnibook 6000, costs about $4,199 and contains 128 Mbytes of RAM, up to a 30-Gbyte hard drive and a bay for a second hard drive or CD-ROM drive.
Gateway Inc., San Diego, worked to lower the cost of its Solo 9500 notebook, according to Phil Osako, the company's director of portable product marketing. A $1,799 option uses a 15-inch display, 128-Mbytes of SDRAM, a 20-Gbyte hard drive, and an integrated ATI M4 graphics chip; a $1,999 model incorporates a slightly larger 15.7-inch display.
Dell Computer Corp. will base its Latitude C800 corporate PC on the new 1-GHz chip, as well as a complementary Inspiron C800 for the home notebook user. The C800 uses the 1-GHz chip, 128-Mbytes of SDRAM, a 15-inch UXGA display, a 10-Gbyte hard disk drive, an ATI M4 Mobility 128 chip, 24X CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and Microsoft Windows 2000 for prices starting at $2,559.
Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, is introducing three models based upon the 1-GHz chip: the Presario 1800, Armada E500, and Armada M700. IBM is introducing the Thinkpad T22 and A22, available on March 28 and April 13, respectively. Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Irvine, Calif., announced the 1-GHz Tecra 8200 notebook and Satellite Pro 4600.
New notebooks using Intel's 1-GHz Pentium III are also expected from Acer America Corp., Fujitsu Corp., Micron Electronics Inc., NEC Corp., and WinBook Computer Corp. |
