KEY POINTS:
Chip-maker Intel is promising better battery life, faster loading times and improved wireless networking for new laptop buyers as sales of portable computers edge towards accounting for half of all computers sold nationally.
The first laptops to feature Intel's new Centrino Duo, which was codenamed Santa Rosa, are
coming on sale and while the computers look no different to previous models, numerous changes have been made based on consumers' changing computer usage habits.
"We're seeing consumers voting for mobile," said Sean Casey, who manages Intel's wireless computing and communications group in Australia and New Zealand.
"In the 2009-2010 time frame, we see the overall market in New Zealand buying more notebooks than desktops."
Laptop sales for PC manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard are already outstripping sales of desktop PCs in the consumer market locally.
"They're becoming the primary device for consumers. The notebook has become a digital media centre on the go," said Casey, who as an Intel design engineer worked on one of the original 486 chip architectures in California in the early nineties.
A faster Core 2 Duo processor forms the basis of Centrino Duo, which also includes the newest standard for Wi-Fi connectivity - 802.11n. Casey said the new wireless standard would allow for up to five times faster wireless data transfer over twice the distance.
"When you start to look at moving high-definition video around and the bandwidth required for that, we deliver on that with 802.11n."
A new feature called Turbo Memory adds some flash memory inside the laptop, storing commonly used programs in its memory to give faster loading times.
"When you do things like boot up or go into hibernate, instead of having to go to the hard drive, you go to this flash device," said Casey.
"It's kind of like a USB flash stick but it runs off the internal PCI express bus in the notebook."
Intel testing showed application load and run times were typically twice as fast on machines equipped with the latest Centrino Duo processors, compared with the previous generation.
Newer laptops were therefore likely to boot up and come out of sleep mode more quickly, something Casey says feedback to Intel suggests was important to users.
"They ask how long does it take you to come out of hibernate? Because [they] will do that 10 or 12 times a day."
Centrino Duo machines will also offer better battery life through lower power usage.
"At the chip level we made some enhancements, so we're seeing four- and five-hour battery life pretty standard on notebooks," said Casey.
"It starts to change your usage habits. I take my laptop home at night. I used to have to sit by the power plug if I was going to work for two or three hours or I'd run out of juice. Now I'm not having to take a power plug home."
Graphics and multimedia performance were improving as well.