Jon Fortt Column

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Don MacDonald has a problem. As director of the Intel group that markets laptop chips, he has to convince buyers of portable computers that raw chip speed isn’t everything.

That’s like Porsche suddenly trying to convince car buyers that horsepower is overrated. For the past 10 years, marketers at Intel have been the loudest voices in the computing industry trumpeting that a high-revving engine, in the form of a chip with a high megahertz rating, is what makes a computer great.

But at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, the Santa Clara chip giant is expected to promote its upcoming Centrino chipset, whose processor actually runs more slowly than Intel’s flagship Pentium 4 Mobile chip for laptops. The tradeoff: the Centrino package uses battery power more efficiently and offers wireless capabilities that Intel’s current chips don’t.

And those are features that today’s business travelers and mobile students want. It’s the equivalent of improving the gas mileage and including a car phone in the Porsche.

“Could we do fast megahertz? You betcha. We could do megahertz up the wazoo,” MacDonald said. “But we made a decision not to do that, in favor of battery life.”

The Centrino platform efficiently gives four hours of battery life to a laptop that would get three hours with the fastest Pentium 4 Mobile chip.

Yet the processor in Centrino, called the Pentium M, is expected to run at 1.3 gigahertz to 1.6 gigahertz, or 1,300 to 1,600 megahertz, compared to 2.4 gigahertz for the current Pentium 4 Mobile.

For tasks like e-mail, Web surfing and PowerPoint presentations, Centrino-based notebooks won’t perform noticeably more slowly than the older designs. However, processor-intensive tasks such as playing video games and burning a movie onto a DVD will lag somewhat.

It’s a tradeoff that customers are increasingly willing to make, as computers move off the desktop, where power usage isn’t an issue, to airplanes and classrooms, where conserving power is crucial. Chips with a faster clock speed — a measure of the tempo at which a processor handles instructions — tend to use more power.

The shift in consumer attitudes, while just beginning, is similar to the one the auto industry experienced 30 years ago. Back then, cars were heavy, and U.S. auto makers liked to advertise the Plymouth Fury and Pontiac GTO based on their horsepower. When the energy crisis hit in 1973, though, buyers became more interested in fuel efficiency, less in muscle.

In the case of Centrino, originally known under the code name Banias, Intel said it built in several new features to improve performance. Among them are technologies that guess what operations the computer will do next based on past behavior, execute more instructions per second and shut down parts of the chip when they are not needed to save power.

Though Intel has used similar concepts in other chips, the company said they are done in new, more effective ways in Centrino.

Despite consumers’ desire for new features, it’s not clear that they’re entirely ready to accept that a slower computer might be better.

Mike Abary, Sony’s U.S. marketing manager for laptops, said that in 2002, Sony underestimated consumer appetites for bulky laptops with fast, power-guzzling Pentium 4 desktop processors.

“Mainstream consumers, less-educated consumers, still put a lot of weight into megahertz,” said Hal Speed, senior manager of strategic initiatives at Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s chief competitor in the microprocessor market.

“That has started to change,” Speed said. “But we’re trying to undo 20 years of history, so it’s obviously going to take some time.”

AMD, based in Sunnyvale, has been emphasizing other features in recent years, after its Athlon processors lost the speed crown to Intel’s chips.

AMD says its chips are just as powerful as faster Intel ones, performing more work per clock tick than some of Intel’s fastest chips.

And Transmeta, one of Intel’s biggest rivals in the mobile market, has claimed for years that clock speed isn’t everything.

Instead, the Santa Clara company touts the long battery life and light weight of notebooks that contain its Crusoe processors.

Now Intel is partially agreeing with its rivals. “Their stock answer is, `Different markets, different demands, different perfomance. For thin and light notebooks, we offer the fastest megahertz,’” said Mike Feibus, an analyst at TekKnowledge in Scottsdale, Ariz.

But Transmeta said Intel has sent the market too many conflicting messages.

Last year, Intel offered about a range of processors for mobile use, from high-end Pentium 4 Mobiles to low-end Celerons.

That confused consumers, said Michael DeNeffe, director of marketing at Transmeta. “Now with the Centrino launch, they are backing off megahertz and talking about performance. It goes completely counter to what was being marketed in the last year.”

Intel said spending on its Centrino marketing campaign will top the $300 million Pentium 4 effort.

MacDonald said advertisements will feature road warriors and students describing how much easier Centrino makes their mobile lives. Though megahertz might factor somewhat into the ads, it will be overshadowed by battery life, wireless communication and the new laptop designs Centrino will enable.

“In the past, the proxy for performance was megahertz,” MacDonald said. “Now, for us it’s mobility.”

Therese Poletti contributed to this report.

—–

To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercurynews.com.

(c) 2003, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

INTC, SNE, AMD, TMTA

More space, science, and technology from RedNova