 
By Daniel A. Begun Secondly, Banias isn't just a new CPU architecture. According to Don MacDonald, director of marketing for Intel's mobile-platforms group, Banias is a whole program from Intel designed to get the industry to rethink the mobile platform. This bold, new platform is based on what Intel calls the four vectors of mobility: improved performance, increased battery life, seamless wireless connectivity, and flexible form factors. Performance Unfortunately, Intel won't comment yet on the more intimate details of the impending Banias CPU family, such as core frequencies. But don't expect CPU speeds as high as 2GHz, as we've seen with the mobile Pentium 4. MacDonald claims that, with Banias, "frequency is actually a secondary consideration." The Banias CPU will feature a new technique for handling instructions and code, called micro ops fusion, which combines instructions for faster execution instead of using raw speed to push instructions through quickly, resulting in a more efficient CPU that consumes less power. Battery life A less powerful CPU contributes toward increased battery life. And another way that Banias will reduce power consumption is with aggressive clock gating, which applies power to only those gates in the CPU that need it at any given moment. By using branch prediction techniques, the CPU should be able to estimate with a very high degree of precision which gates will be needed and turn them on beforehand.
The true power savings on the mobile platform, however, won't come until there's a major innovation in battery technology. Supercapacitors have started showing up in PDAs and could very well make an appearance in notebooks soon. We might even start seeing fuel cells in notebooks within the next three to five years, according to MacDonald. Wireless One of the requirements of the Banias platform is that it will include a wireless NIC, which Intel claims will have dual-band 802.11a/802.11b capabilities. The company is officially silent on just where in your Banias device the wireless NIC will reside, but based on comments that Paul Otellini, Intel's president and COO, made in his keynote speech at WinHEC 2002, as well as information in an Intel white paper on CMOS Radio, it is more than likely that the wireless NIC will be integrated into either the CPU or the motherboard chipset. This should ruffle the feathers of add-in card manufacturers.
Form factors The Banias CPU is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all approach, so the typical design considerations for larger form factors running at faster frequencies--such as servers and high-end desktops--need not be factored into the core CPU design. Banias will have considerably smaller circuit sizes than any of the CPUs that Intel produces today, and Banias's low power and undemanding thermal-cooling requirements will permit a veritable smorgasbord of form-factor options. Perhaps Banias will open the door for the first computer on a wristwatch. The mobile Pentium 4 will still be around in high-end desktop replacements, but Banias will be most prevalent in thin-and-light notebooks. I wouldn't be surprised if Banias winds up being the final nail in the coffin for Transmeta's Crusoe.
Daniel A. Begun is CNET Labs' manager in New York.    The latest
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