Computing · 09:05
Power-efficient laptop processors
Thin laptops that last a working day depend on chips that do more with less power. Intel's team in Haifa changed course to make that possible.
The everyday moment
You open your laptop on a train, work through the morning, and the battery is still more than half full. Twenty-five years ago laptops were heavy, hot and needed a socket after two hours.
What changed
- Speed was the old goalFor years chips got faster mostly by running at higher clock speeds. That produced more and more heat, and laptops needed fans and batteries to match.
- Efficiency became the goalThe Haifa team argued that thin, light laptops would need chips that did more work per tick of the clock, not just more ticks.
- BaniasTheir chip, built on an older, efficient Intel design with better prediction and a bigger cache, drew about 24.5 watts on average and was made for battery life.
- A package for laptopsIntel sold it as part of Centrino, a platform for notebook computers.
The Israeli story
In the early 2000s Intel's Israel Development Center in Haifa saw that the race for ever-higher clock speeds was producing too much heat. Thin, light laptops, they argued, would otherwise need fans thicker than the machine itself.
They designed a different chip, codenamed Banias after an ancient site, and persuaded the company's leadership to back it. It reached the market in March 2003 as the Pentium M, at the heart of Centrino.
Centrino made light business laptops with near-desktop performance normal, and helped Intel's sales grow 13% a year from 2003 to 2005. The same Haifa centre went on to create the Core 2 Duo, unveiled in 2006, which became the basis for Intel's processors for years.
Where you meet it today
The idea the Haifa team pushed, performance per watt instead of raw speed, is now how almost every chip in laptops and phones is judged.
Did you know?
After the Core 2 Duo launch, Intel introduced more than 40 processors in 100 days, most of them based on the Israeli design.