Monday, May 10, 2004
17" Wide Screen Notebook Coming from Sony?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 11:00 AM
"Second stunner from Sony today: there’s nothing official yet, but Sony will follow the lead of just about every other manufacturer and introduce a 17-inch wide-screen laptop that will supposedly come with either a 1.8GHz or 2.0GHz processor, an 80GB hard drive, and an 128MB video card. More details are sure to come."
engadget has a brief blurb about a rumoured Sony laptop, and this is good news for those of you who have been looking for a Memory-stick compatible mobile media editing device. I use the term "mobile" tongue-in-cheek though when talking about laptop with a massive 17" screen. What I found most interesting about this news is the mention of a 1.8 Ghz or 2.0 Ghz CPU - I have this strong hunch that it will be one of the new Dothan processors, the follow-up CPU to the Pentium 4M, what we've seen in most Centrino-based notebooks.
This is a departure from the strategy of other 17" notebook vendors who have paired the massive laptops with top-end desktop CPUs. You get more power, but at the cost of battery life. Battery life has been the hallmark of many Sony products, so it's logical to assume that they feel a 2.0 Ghz Dothan CPU with 2 MB of cache, which should perform similarly to a 3.0 Ghz P4, is close enough in the performance department to make power-hungry users happy while still being more battery friendly than a desktop P4 chip. The next few months will be very interesting for those of use who are looking for big-screen laptops with processing-crunching power. When I encode WMV files on my P5010D, I'm reminded of why a 900 mhz processor just doesn't cut it for video rendering, so I'm looking forward with great anticipation to what laptop vendors have planned for the new Dothan chips.
engadget has a brief blurb about a rumoured Sony laptop, and this is good news for those of you who have been looking for a Memory-stick compatible mobile media editing device. I use the term "mobile" tongue-in-cheek though when talking about laptop with a massive 17" screen. What I found most interesting about this news is the mention of a 1.8 Ghz or 2.0 Ghz CPU - I have this strong hunch that it will be one of the new Dothan processors, the follow-up CPU to the Pentium 4M, what we've seen in most Centrino-based notebooks.
This is a departure from the strategy of other 17" notebook vendors who have paired the massive laptops with top-end desktop CPUs. You get more power, but at the cost of battery life. Battery life has been the hallmark of many Sony products, so it's logical to assume that they feel a 2.0 Ghz Dothan CPU with 2 MB of cache, which should perform similarly to a 3.0 Ghz P4, is close enough in the performance department to make power-hungry users happy while still being more battery friendly than a desktop P4 chip. The next few months will be very interesting for those of use who are looking for big-screen laptops with processing-crunching power. When I encode WMV files on my P5010D, I'm reminded of why a 900 mhz processor just doesn't cut it for video rendering, so I'm looking forward with great anticipation to what laptop vendors have planned for the new Dothan chips.
