Where's Alviso? - Intel’s History, and Dothan’s Promise
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Dothan initially had its own problems. Much like Intel's "Prescott" desktop CPU, Dothan is built on the 90nm fabrication process and shares the technical difficulties associated with that processor. Prescott was fixed first, and Dothan left for after, due to Banias’s lack of competition, as well as some overstock their vendors wanted to clear out. After a fairly lengthy delay, Dothan finally made its debut in May. Along with that announcement, Intel released details on Alviso, which was to ship in the second half. This new pair of chips enabled many features that would bring the platform up to date with desktops -- and in some ways, even surpass them.
Let’s start with the use of DDR2. Typically laptops have stayed well behind desktops in memory technology and performance, but it certainly looks like Intel intends to eclipse that. Only recently has the i925X/i915 added that capability to Intel's desktop line, and for the most part, systems making use of that have been scarce. Even in the retail sector, it's been difficult to find DDR2 memory, as well as the boards and processors that support it. Yet, here we are, with laptops (of all things) being brought forth and presented with this technology.
The jury is still out on whether this provides any current performance benefits (so far the results do not look good for DDR2 at equivalent speeds), but it is the way of the future from an R&D standpoint, since DDR1 is reaching the limits of what can be done physically to make it faster without resorting to large voltage increases and the associated heat. Of course, in the language of mobile computing, heat and voltage are curse words that no engineer wants to hear. DDR2 brings the potential for easy future speed increases, as well as reduced voltage requirements (1.8V as opposed to 2.5V) and better packaging.
These all are good things, as long as they are not also dragging insane prices with them. At the moment if you look up DDR2 prices at a retailer like NewEgg, you might very well suffer a heart attack. That's not a positive, and might be part of the reason for the delay. Laptop memory has always enjoyed a price premium over desktop modules, and if that holds true here, it's going to cost the public a lot to equip their laptops with the increasingly large amounts of RAM that seem to be necessary.
Another technology making its appearance in Alviso is PCI Express (PCIe). I'm not quite sure where the benefit is for this currently, as there aren't a large number of devices such as RAID or professional DV Editing cards dragging down on the old PCI bus in laptop applications. Again, this seems more like a future benefit, as opposed to something that will pay immediate dividends. Most graphics cards are moving towards using PCIe for connection on the desktop. This just makes it easier to cross those products over to the mobile realm in the future, and perhaps even lend the kind of customization and upgrade abilities customary on the desktop to laptops.
At the outset though, it looks like Intel plans to push its own integrated graphics engine as the standard on Sonoma. After their most recent dismal attempts in this market, I'm not going to get too excited until hardware is in my hands. As usual, ExtremeGraphics3 has been touted rather highly in press releases from Intel. By adding support for Pixel Shader 2.0 though, they at least covered the ability for this engine to drive the GUI of Microsoft's upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows.
Other multimedia parts of Alviso are much more interesting. One of those is the "Azalia" high definition audio. Now, laptop speakers themselves are FAR from anything I would use for quality music entertainment. But by adding in support for Dolby Digital, DTS, and DVD-Audio decoding as well as 7.1 surround sound, you now could potentially hook the laptop into a home theater setup and not suffer for it. This would make your mobile an excellent platform to integrate with a projector for quiet, low power, and amazingly versatile entertainment.
Next: So, Did Intel Learn Anything from That? >>
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