Laptops are becoming more and more popular; more laptops were sold last year than desktops. Consumers love their portability and small size; manufacturers love their profitability. And nobody loves them more than Intel, whose Centrino platform is the basis for the vast majority of modern laptops. Since the beginning, Centrino has offered good battery life, solid performance-per-watt, and built-in wireless. This article will talk about the latest Centrino platform and its associated processor, code-named Yonah and officially branded the Core Duo.
Centrino has gone through three generations. The first, codenamed Banias, consisted of what was essentially an updated Pentium III chip with the Pentium 4-style 400 MHz quad-pumped front-side bus, called the Pentium-M, as well as the 855 chipset family and the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100B MiniPCI wireless card. Any Centrino laptop had to have all three components. (I should explain that all Intel chipsets and processors are code-named using the name of a city or region. Banias is a city in Syria.) Banias received an update midway through its lifecycle – Intel introduced a new version of the Pentium-M, codenamed Dothan, that was based on 90-nanometer manufacturing process (the old Banias chip used a 130nm one) and had 2 MB of L2 cache instead of 1 MB; they also introduced an updated 855 chipset, the 855GME, and a new 801.11b/g wireless card to replace the 802.11b-only one.
The second generation Centrino Mobile Technology, introduced in January 2005, was code-named Sonoma. It used a revised Dothan chip with a 533 MHz frontside bus, the Alviso (915PM/GM) chipset, and either the previously introduced PRO/Wireless 2200BG card or the new 2915ABG (802.11a/b/g) card. It also supported PCI-Express graphics cards and Serial ATA, which the 855 chipset had not. Sonoma was a runaway success, and several manufacturers realized it offered good gaming performance to boot – the Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 is the most notable Sonoma gaming laptop.
With that history lesson finished, we can talk about Intel’s brand-spanking-new Centrino platform, Napa, and its associated chip, Yonah. Yonah joins the Pentium D and Athlon 64 x2 in the dual-core arena – but instead of being a power-hungry, hot-running desktop chip, it is specifically designed for laptops. It essentially offers two Dothan cores running on a 667 MHz front-side bus; the L2 cache is shared between the cores, and the processor shuts off one core while on unplugged to conserve battery life. As usual, it comes with a new chipset (the 945PM/GM) and a new wireless card (the 3915ABG).
Yonah has been eagerly anticipated, and already we’ve seen a few laptops that feature it. These include the Dell Inspiron E1705/Inspiron 9400; the Acer Travelmate 8200; and the Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and X60. Most notably, though, Apple has released a new PowerBook that uses Yonah instead of their venerable PowerPC architecture – except it’s not called a PowerBook, it’s called the MacBook Pro. Besides the awkward name, the MacBook Pro is thinner, lighter, and much faster than its predecessor. The iMac has also been fitted with a Yonah chip, making it one of only a few desktops to use a mobile processor.
Great, so now that Apple’s products use Intel processors, it’ll be possible to run Windows XP on Apple’s lust-inducing hardware. Well, not so fast. The new Intel Macs use a replacement for the 25-year old BIOS-based startup process, called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). It’s a great new technology, but XP doesn’t support it – so there’s no easy way to install XP on an EFI-based computer. Thus, one Mac user has started a contest through which the first person to get a new Intel Mac to run Windows XP gets $6000. Already, a rather complicated solution has been devised, but who knows whether a solution that complex will be eligible for the prize.
An issue that isn’t unique to the Yonah-based Macs is that of battery life on the new platform. Tom’s hardware Guide did some preliminary testing of Yonah’s performance and battery life, and found the battery life to be quite lacking. They did some more testing and discovered that the cause was a bug in a Microsoft driver that caused the battery to drain very quickly whenever a USB 2.0 device was attached to the laptop. Microsoft has no plans to issue an immediate fix, even though they’ve known about the problem since the middle of last year; however, this is a big enough issue that Intel may develop a fix itself.
That’s not the only problem with Yonah, either. Apparently 34 problems have been found with the way the chip handles instructions, some of them relatively serious. Some have decided that Yonah is a lemon, so to speak, although I disagree. Previous chip designs dating back to the original Pentium have all had issues with instruction handling, most of them correctable through software. Additionally, the problems with Yonah only crop up in specific, rare instances.
All in all, although Yonah does have its faults, I think it’s a big step forward from previous Intel processors. Best of all, as stated in a previous article of mine, Yonah is the stepping stone to Merom/Conroe, which will be the final end of the P4 NetBurst architecture. And that’s definitely something to look forward to.
