The new Pentium M on 90nm will be made available on the 10th of May. This CPU is codenamed Dothan, and has 2MB L2 cache. This processor is ofcourse ment for notebooks.
According to Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobile processor departement the Dothan will provide the same level of battery life as the current Pentium M, with better performance.
An increase in cache size requires more power to feed the additional transistors, but Intel can do several things in its architectural design to better manage that power, says Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research.
The Banias Pentium M processor is a good example of well-managed power consumption, and Intel will probably use similar and more-sophisticated techniques to handle the power consumed by Dothan's larger cache and possible current leakage, McCarron says.
Later this year Intel will bundle the Dothan with the Alviso chipset and new dual-band wireless internet chips to create Sonoma. Sonama is the codename for the next-gen Centrino platform.
Alviso promises to consume less power than current mobile chipsets from Intel, and Sonama will also include technologies to reduce the amount of power consumed by a laptop display.
Dothan will also be the first chip launched since Intel decided in March to adopt a performance-based numbering scheme. All future Pentium M chips will fall into the 700 series. Intel will rate chips based on a number of factors, such as clock speed and cache size.
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