There's no power like low power

All modern PC notebook designs struggle with the weight, noise, heat, battery life, and performance issues of their earliest ancestors, and users' expectations have advanced far faster than mobile technology. Intel kept shrinking its Pentium 4 desktops to mobile forms, trying to keep up, but that was a race it couldn't win.

The Pentium 4 is Intel's hottest desktop processor in more ways than one. Users were shocked to learn that Intel routinely ran its mobile processors at half their rated speed to reduce heat and extend the battery. They were equally unimpressed by news reports of super-fast PC notebooks leaving burns on users' laps. Other notebooks made headlines with recalls of overburdened AC power adapters that would overheat and fail. They'd even catch fire, albeit rarely.

Remarkable as it seems, it wasn't until early 2003 that Intel introduced a mobile chipset (CPU and supporting components) that was designed especially for mobile use. Before Centrino, all Intel-based notebooks were based on adaptations of chips designed for AC-powered desktop computers. This was a cost-effective way to meet users' rapidly rising performance demands in the desktop and the mobile space at the same time.

Intel had a low-power processor technology, code-named Banias, in engineering for a while. But as long as the market accepted that good mobile performance meant dealing with machines that burned through pants and batteries, there was little pressure to hurry Banias's debut.

The interloper

In 2002, the PC notebook market was shaken up by Apple's PowerBook G4, a PowerPC-based notebook that struck an ideal balance between application performance and battery life. In fact, the PowerBook juggled these objectives so well that it left observers wondering how tiny Apple had managed what massive Intel could not. Instead of shrinking a desktop architecture down to fit a notebook, Apple engineered the PowerBook G4 from the ground up as a fast and energy-efficient mobile platform. And instead of ramping up the processor's clock speed to boost performance, Apple extracted a bigger kick from adding a huge, 1MB, high-speed cache to a 1GHz RISC processor. The result was a sleek, six-pound portable with a large, bright display; incredibly fast graphics; impressive performance; integrated wireless networking; and a five-hour battery. Until the PowerBook G4 appeared, the market assumed that these attributes could not be combined in a battery-operated computer. It took Apple several years and a lot of customer-driven engineering to get it right. Owning the whole platform right down to the operating system gave Apple opportunities for optimization that few other vendors enjoy.

Once Apple had done the notebook the right way, PC customers started asking when it would be their turn. Even if Apple hadn't come along with the PowerBook G4, customers would have grown tired of the trade-offs they have endured since the first PC portables emerged in the '80s. The onus was on Intel to give its OEMs (such as Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, and IBM) the ability to create a PC notebook that would impose few, if any, compromises on its users.

Intel's three-part answer