Intel readies four additional mobile processors

Intel plans to follow Monday’s mobile processor launch with four more chips for portables slated for release over the next few months, according to information posted inadvertently on Dell’s Web site Monday.

Intel plans to follow Monday’s mobile processor launch with four more chips for portables slated for release over the next few months, according to information posted inadvertently on Dell’s Web site Monday.

Intel launched the first three processors in the next generation of its Pentium M line, code named Dothan, at a press event at San Francisco Monday. Built on a more advanced manufacturing process, the first Dothan chips are the Pentium M 735 at 1.75 GHz, the 745 at 1.8GHz, and the 755 at 2GHz.

Four subsequent processors will be offered in Dell’s products in the third quarter of 2003, a Dell spokesman confirmed. They will be the Pentium M 715 and 725, and the low-voltage Pentium M 753 and 733.

A document posted on Dell’s Web site describes the 715 as a 1.5GHz processor with 2M bytes of Level 2 cache and a 400MHz front-side bus. The 725 will have similar specifications but run at a clock speed of 1.6GHz, according to the document.

The low-voltage 753 and 733 processors, meanwhile, will have clock speeds of 1.5GHz and 1.4GHz, respectively. Both will also sport 2M bytes of cache and the 400MHz system bus, according to the document.

The Web page was inadvertently published Monday and has since been revised so as not to include the upcoming Dothan processors. “We made a mistake,” a Dell spokeswoman said.

In an interview at Monday’s Dothan launch, the vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, Anand Chandrasekher, confirmed that his company was expecting to launch 1.5 and 1.6GHz updates to Dothan “at the tail-end of summer.”

The Dothan chips are Intel’s first mobile processors built using a 90-nanometer process, which allows Intel to create smaller gates and circuits on the chips than the 130-nanometer process it used for the Pentium M processors code-named Banias. Dothan processors will have 140 million transistors, or about twice as many as their predecessors.

Pentium M forms the basis of Intel’s Centrino mobile package, which also includes the Intel 855 mobile chipset and a wireless network chip.

The Dothan chips are presently supported on 28 mobile products, Chandrasekher said. “By mid-July, our expectation is about 50 systems will be in the marketplace,” he said. “We’re expecting a very quick ramp on the 90 nanometer technology.”

By the third quarter of 2004, more than half of Intel’s Pentium M shipments will be based on Dothan, Chandrasekher predicted.

(Tom Krazit in Boston contributed to this story.)