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>There was a big article in EE Times about the upcomming Pentium laptops. >The general gist of the article was that they are horrible! The Pentium >Intel is intending for laptops are Tab-bonded -- they are a 3.3V P5 >die mounted exposed on a polymer substrate. Only megalithic corporations >like IBM have the facilities to manufacture Tab-bonded sytems. Even >Compaq was interviewed in the article as questioning whether they would >invest the funds necessary. That's interesting since Midwest Micro has a Pentium 90 notebook out. I don't know it's performance but it's got an L2 cache, is PCI, and 64-bit. It also includes an IR port as well as 16550UART, EPP, etc. Looks very packed. Now, we know Midwest Micro didn't make this machine, but who did? I don't see any other ads for any Pentium notebooks yet. And also, Toshiba has a Pentium machine coming out. It could be that Intel is still trying to play their low-power notebook and get rid of their CPUs somehow game -- relegate a lower power CPU to notebooks (say the 75MHz) and make more of a gradient... I'm really getting sick of Intel. >The bottom line is that the first Pentium laptops will be in the same >situation as the first 486 laptops -- battery life in minutes, lousy >performance, and overheating problems. Yes, but like the first 486s, the first Pentium notebooks will still run rings around current 486 notebooks. Desktop 486s still run rings around notebook 486s. >On another note, I've been hoping for a higher resolution LCD panel. The >engineers that design these systems said that text display in 800x600 on >a 9.5 inch panel is so small as to be unreadable. The 10.4 inch display >is marginal, but only available in large quantities as dual scan passive. Who cares what they think. Just put the damn things out and let the market decide! ;) >I'd rather see IBM spend their time making a PowerPC 603-based laptop >which runs Windoze :) Bah, I'd rather see the 603+ chip running OS/2! :) Or even MacOS. --- Sean Chou / schou@uiuc.edu / CompuServe 73672,2111