More power to your laptop

Advances in processor design, a glut of LCD panels and continuing price pressure as chip manufacturers fight it out, will combine to bring a new breed of cheaper notebooks into the market over the next nine months.

The promise, and we've heard this promise many times in the past, is for the notebook Nirvana: a machine that has between eight and 10 hours of battery life, a large screen and full multimedia capabilities at an affordable price.

Mike Bonello, Intel's mobile business client marketing manager in Europe, says that there is an inexorable trend towards notebooks and away from the desktop, due to advances in software as well as components in the notebook itself.

"The traditional cost of ownership for notebooks was very high and it was a pain to synchronise them with desktop PCs," he explained. "As we've moved to Windows 2000 and other software management systems, the cost of ownership for IT departments has significantly reduced from what it was two or three years ago."

The Gartner Group, a market research firm, claims that this element in the price of a notebook has fallen by 27 per cent over this period, as firms have realised that giving a notebook to their staff makes them more productive, whether it be at home or travelling.

New mobile Pentium III processors which Intel introduced in mid-July based on a 0.13 micron process rather than the existing 0.18 micron process will help the move towards the light and ultra-light market and away from the full-size machine, says Bonello. He estimates that this chunk will represent around 60 per cent of the market in a year's time, with ultra-small notebooks being increasingly used.

"The 0.13 micron process for mobiles will give significant improvements in power efficiency," he said. This is because the smaller chips will need less power, and so the battery will last longer.

Technological wizardry

Intel is widely expected to start producing its Pentium 4 for the notebook market early in 2002 and, as the die size for this processor is currently much larger than for the Pentium III, we have to presume that Intel will perform some technological wizardry to put this processor into notebook cases. At the same time it will have to keep the heat down and the clock speeds up to offer any advantage over the current Pentium III technology.

Although Intel has had the x86 mobile market largely sewn up over the past two to three years, AMD introduced mobile Athlon processors into the market in June at clock speeds of 1Ghz, and is expected to have its mobile Duron processors on the market by the time you read this.

While it is likely to be some time before AMD makes inroads into Intel's lion's share of the market, the company has already signed up Sony, Fujitsu, Compaq, Hewlett Packard and NEC to make machines using its processors. Richard Baker, north European marketing director at AMD, believes his company will be able to compete with anything Intel can offer.

"We're at 1Ghz at the moment and we're confident that we can compete with any speeds that Intel can produce and may even have speed leadership in the market," he said.

Baker claimed that AMD's PowerNow technology, which varies the clock speed of the processor depending on the application in order to conserve battery life, is more flexible than Intel's SpeedStep equivalent.

He echoes Bonello's statement that notebooks are taking more and more market share, and believes that as many as 40 per cent of commercial or corporate sales this year will be notebooks, over desktops.

Both agree that the prices of notebooks are also falling as a result of both economies of scale and market forces, and that this trend is set to continue.

The young pretender

Neither AMD nor Intel will have the whole of the x86 market this year - Transmeta introduced its 1Ghz Crusoe chip at the end of June. In the past, reviewers of Transmeta-based products have scored machines much higher on battery life than the competition, but the performance of the chip does not always shine. Transmeta posted a profits warning in June which has cast something of a shadow over its future.

The most expensive component in a notebook has always been its TFT screen but in the past nine months the price of this component has fallen, leading many to hope for big cuts in the prices of machines.

However, Bob Raikes, chief analyst at Jon Peddle Associates, Europe, believes that the phenomenon has now ceased. "Prices have pretty well bottomed out now," he explained. The production of LCD panels from which the TFTs are made is a cyclical business, and he said that a combination of a slower market and a glut of components led to the shortfall. "There is a view that prices may go down a bit more during this year, but we don't think so," he said.

Somewhat curiously, there is no premium for the TFT screens in the notebook market, said Raikes. Screens for notebooks can cost as little as $2 (£1.33) per square inch out of the factory, but two-inch square colour units, such as those used in PDAs, cost $10 a square inch because of the high sales value of these items.

By this time next year, top-end notebooks, which are likely to be slim and ultra-slim models, will probably be running at 1.5Ghz or more, and we can also expect to see a number of integrated graphics solutions from both nVidia and ATi, helping to make the machines far more like desktop PCs in terms of sound and graphics.