Intel spills beans on Yonah, the next laptop chip

Yonah, a laptop chip coming from Intel early next year, is going to be a lot different to its predecessors, company executives say.

The chip, which will be made on the 65-nanometer process, will come with a number of enhancements over the current Pentium M line of notebook chips, Mooly Eden, vice president of the company's mobility group, said at a briefing in San Francisco.

For one thing, it will contain two cores, instead of the single core on current notebook chips. The two separate cores will also share a 2MB cache. Current dual-core desktop chips from AMD and Intel come with similar-sized caches, but each core accesses only 1MB of cache memory dedicated to it. Sharing the cache will significantly boost performance. (The chips communicate with the cache through a single bus embedded in the chip.)

"When I speak of dual cores, I am not talking about a 10 per cent to 20 per cent improvement in performance. I am speaking about something crazy," Eden said.

A single-core version of Yonah will also be released for budget notebooks.

Laptops have become a significant profit centre for Intel. In 1999, notebook processors accounted for about 17 per cent of Intel's output. In the first quarter of this year, notebook chips accounted for 30 per cent of the output, and the figure is expected to rise to about 33 per cent next year. In the first quarter, notebook sales in US retail, a small but significant subsegment of the overall PC market, passed sales of desktops for the first time.

Yonah will come with improved technology for curbing power consumption and heat dissipation. It will also sport features currently found on desktops to enhance security.

Partly because of reduced power consumption, the footprint on Yonah notebooks will be up to 31 per cent smaller than those of existing notebooks. By 2008, Intel's goal is to reduce power consumption in notebooks overall to the point where machines can run for eight hours on a single battery charge.

One thing Yonah won't have, at least initially, is the ability to run 64-bit applications.

"We made a conscious decision not to include it" because of the impact on battery life, Eden said.

Intel said it will release a 64-bit chip for notebooks when the market "requires" it. What "requires" means is a source of debate. Longhorn, the next big OS release from Microsoft, is a 64-bit operating system. It will be released in late 2006. Rival AMD is making 64-bit notebook chips for that eventuality. Having a similar chip would allow Intel to blunt any gains by AMD.

On the other hand, Eden said that demand for 64-bit computing is actually very low. "It may take many years for enterprises to demand it," he said.

Yonah will also contain more transistors -- 151.6 million -- than the current Pentium M, which has about 140 million transistors. Still, because it will be produced on the more advanced 65-nanometer process, Yonah will be smaller and therefore cost less to produce. "The margins will be great because it is a tiny product," Eden stated.

He further added that the Yonah chip has been in the works for years. "I believe we were designing it before anyone knew how to spell dual core," he said.

The chip will be paired with a chipset, called Calistoga, and a Wi-Fi module, called Golan, that will receive and send 802.11a, b and g. Later versions will come with 802.11n, the so-called MIMO technology. Wimax will start to be added in notebooks as an option around 2007, a spokesman said.