by Anna Filatova
06/19/2002 | 12:43 PM
According to our sources in Intel, despite the recent launch of their pretty successful integrated Pentium 4 chipset, i845G, the mobile solution of the kind appeared to be slightly delayed. Today Pentium 4-M CPUs are targeted for full size notebooks market. In this market the mobile computer manufacturers have to be happy with the discrete i845MP/MZ chipsets and use add-on graphics chips for their products. However, Intel is going to push its Pentium 4-M into the thin&light notebooks sector, where the manufacturers prefer to use integrated chipsets. At the same time, Intel doesn’t have a mobile integrated chipset, which they could offer their partners now. This way, Pentium 4-M is very likely to have hard times when moving into the market.
The situation may be even worse for Intel in the value notebooks market. In Q3 the company is planning to move its mobile Celeron family to Pentium 4 architecture and to start producing mobile Celeron CPUs on Northwood core. They will be made with 0.13micron manufacturing technology and will be designed to work with 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus. However, Intel doesn’t have a corresponding integrated chipset supporting new Celeron processors. So, as we see, the sales of new mobile Celeron may also fail.<%BANNER[article]%>
The mobile chipsets Intel is currently offering, i845MP and i845MZ, are both i845 analogues, as they support DDR266/200 SDRAM. The first integrated chipset for the mobile Pentium 4-M CPUs will come out only in Q1 2003. It will be a solution aka Montara-GML, which should start sampling only in the beginning of next month.
Montara-GML is a mobile analogy to i845G supporting up to 1GB DDR266/DDR200 SDRAM and featuring an integrated graphics core with UMA architecture, which allows output to two devices simultaneously. Also Montara-GML will be provided with a new ICH4-M South Bridge supporting up to 6 USB 2.0 ports.
This way, until 2003 Intel’s only hope is ATI, which was going to start mass production of its mobile integrated solution for Pentium 4-M in summer already.