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Intel unveil new UMPC platform
By Good MooD | April 7, 2007
INTEL WILL BE releasing a new ultra mobile PC platform at IDF Beijing, on April 18, according to slides published by HKEPC.
Whilst most have suggested the UMPC is a product which serves no readily discernible need, it seems that Microsoft and Intel are content to keep punting out new revisions. Bill Gates, it is rumoured, is a TabletPC fetishist and will lose no opportunity to inflict ‘handwriting computing’ on the world at large.
Intel’s new platform will be dubbed ‘McCaslin’, and at the heart of it will be a new 90nm processor, ‘Stealey’, which will be based on Dothan at a clock speed of 600MHz and 800MHz.
The chip is designed to compete with VIA’s popuar C7M, which found its way into a Samsung device last year. The northbridge has GMA X3000 graphics, which supports Aero Glass for the ‘Premium’ Vista experience. Given the legendarily appalling battery life of UMPC products, is enabling Glass really the best use of power?
The chips have been redesigned and reworked to be physically smaller, with the new combo achieving a footprint of 975mm² compared to 2915mm² in the previous generation. The average TDP for the system is a mere 1.95W and, allegedly, battery life is in the five-hour vicinity.
Amazingly, the slides suggest that UMPCs could make up 10 per cent of the PC market by 2010, with integrated memory controllers and peripherals increasing performance and leading battery life north of 12 hours. We wonder if the folks at Intel have been inhaling the substrate, not putting it on the silicon.
{HKEPC}
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