Beyond high-end $15,000 machines that run Unix or Windows NT and are manufactured at a rate of 10 a month, you may have to wait a bit for a Pentium Pro-based notebook computer. But according to US PC Week, there is a pretty nifty Pentium for notebooks on the way. The paper hears that late this year, Intel Corp will come out with an MMX-enabled 200MHz Pentium codenamed Tillamook, built on a pop-out module called MMO that makes it simple to upgrade to future processors. The module is expected to include processor, Level 2 cache, a voltage regulator, a clock and a forthcoming Peripheral Component Interconnect chip set called the 430TX. It is said to use common connector pins that attach to the notebook’s motherboard so that instead of having to plug a new processor into the motherboard, users can plug processors into the module, and it will support the next three mobile processor generations. The idea is that users will for the first time be able to preserve their investment in costly notebooks by being able to upgrade, and that notebook manufacturers will be able to get to market sooner with the latest products if they use the universal module. At the other end of the scale, the company is also expected to offer a Pentium Pro that will come with a massive 1Mb of internal Level 2 cache compared with the current maximum cache of 512Kb. Intel is also working on a modified version of the existing multiprocessor-capable Orion chip set intended to maximise performance in high-end four-processor compute and database servers for distributed environments.
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