The long road to thin and light computing (part 1)
With ultrabook making a silent
rebellion in personal computing, John Gillooly is considering how Intel ends up
coming to this thin and light mobile version.
Intel has a long-term history in focusing
on product names registered trademarks. It was a tradition since 406, when
Intel could not obviously register a number as the trademark, and 596 became
Pentium. Thus, there are many famous brands in the field of computing such as
Centrino and Netbook, as well as some names which are less well-known like
VIIV.
As this tradition, Ultrabook is a brand of
Intel, so Intel can manage who use this term and what it means. While it can be
consider as a trick to prevent AMD from following, laptop buyers benefit
because they can feel secure that if there is anything use the label of
Ultrabook, it will comply with specific guidelines as size and type of
processors. We saw a local manufacturer change its marketing strategy after it
had released an “Ultrabook” based on Atom, which Intel rushed headlong to
attack quickly.
The first time we heard about Ultrabook was
at the Computex commercial exhibition in Taiwan last June, after ASUS launched
UX21 and UX31 model. Since them it has been promoted by Intel along with laptop
producers who released their first product line before Christmas Eve. The first
marketing has peaked with the flood of designs and various products introduced
in CES in January.
You can suspiciously see Ultrabook concept like
a fake marketing tool. However, this laptop of new generation which is thin,
light and cheap actually marks an important moment in the long history of
mobile computing. This design used to account for the expensive segment of the
market, because of historical difficulties in reducing the power consumption
and heat capacity of the processor to match the shape factor.
Long and roundabout road
The main character for all is Intel, which
have spent much time and effort in order to change the design philosophy that
desktop came first and laptop followed it. It relates to the long jumps in a
large number of decades from the raw gigahertz number, which topped with
Pentium 4 consuming too much power that directs to use CPU smarter.
When Pentium 4 was launched, desktops still
dominated the PC market where laptop was mostly business tools. The first
mobile Pentium 4 devices were designed to move from this socket to other
socket, and it was clearly that structure and microstructure couldn’t cut it in
mobile space. It gave birth to Pentium-M, based on Pentium 3 structure more
than Pentium4. By doing this and making a separated low voltage CPU focusing on
mobile, Intel could push laptops forward, right at the moment AMD was beating
it about performance on desktops.
The main problem with the processor design
is that it’s very difficult to get a structure built around the power and heat
output consumption and cut down it to fit the requirement of mobile users. The
consumption of +100W is good when PC is plugged into a socket, located in a
case with a large cooling fan and many fans for airflow management.
Nevertheless, if you put it into a mobile frame, you not only cope with weak
electrical capacity of lithium ion battery technology and alkali hydride metal
but also you suddenly have no room to dispel the heat from CPU.
Nowadays, laptop design became a kind of
art. Technologies such as heat pipes is widely used even in desktop fans,
completed to work in laptop frame and allow engineers to dispel heat from the
processor to proper positions to eliminate. New materials like magnesium alloy
become popular, turning all laptop frames into cooling devices.
