Monday, October 6, 2003		Feature

INTEL, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, expects that in just a few years laptops will run for a full day on a single battery charge, thanks to improvements to its new Centrino chip.

David Perlmutter, in charge of Intel’s laptop chips, has said these new energy-efficient laptops would become increasingly popular among companies and their staff—only 30 per cent of whom are currently allowed to have laptops.

Owning an early version of such a laptop, Haifa, Israel-based Perlmutter permitted himself break with a family tradition—not to take computers to holidays. Two DVD movies played on the laptop on a single battery charge kept his 11-year old daughter fully entertained during a five-hour holiday drive. Five hours is more than what most computer users get out of their ageing laptops, counting themselves lucky with three. But Perlmutter thinks even five hours is not enough.

"We’ll add another hour in the next year. But the real tipping point is when we can make laptops that will last for seven or eight hours on a single battery charge. There will be one or two laptops that can do that next year, but for most laptops it will take a few more years," he said.

Perlmutter is general manager at Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, the unit responsible for the Centrino chips for laptops launched early this year. Centrino is set to become for thin laptops what Intel’s Pentium microprocessor is for heavy-duty desktop computers, and the world’s leading chipmaker is pumping $300 million into marketing the new name. Six months after its launch, Intel recently unveiled the next generation of Centrino, also known as the Wi-Fi chipset because of the component that allows access to short-range wireless computer networks in offices, homes and public "hot spots". — Reuters