Napa and Yonah - Intel's New Mobile Platform

Posted by Matthew Brodsky

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The holiday season is upon us, so perhaps I can be forgiven for first thinking that Napa and Yonah were two of Santa's eager, elven helpers. After a sound thrashing from the editor, I was informed that Napa is Intel's new mobile platform, and Yonah Intel's first dual core microprocessor. The Napa platform is believed to be a vast improvement on Sonoma, which was based on Centrino technology.

At a time when your average laptop user is just figuring out what the heck Sonoma is, Intel has gone and announced its next mobile wonder-technology. On December 13, Intel unveiled Napa. Intel claimed that Napa and Yonah, its first dual-core mobile Pentium processor and essential component of the Napa platform, are crescendos in mobile laptop technology development around the world.

If Intel's numbers hold true under independent testing, this may be the case. According to Intel, Napa can shoot laptop performance 68 percent higher than Sonoma while beefing up a laptop's wireless bandwidth. Napa also could also cut power use by as much as 28 percent on average, pushing battery life beyond the 5-hour range.

The key, said Intel, is the dual-core processor, Yonah, at Napa's heart. The double-tasking chip can complete jobs quicker and tap into so-called Dynamic Power Coordination, which means that each core can use power independently of one other. One core could even shut down, leaving the other to manage a notebook. This techie gobbledygook translates into a platform that will use only 3 watts of juice typically, compared to the 4 watts that most other mobile chipsets need for fuel.

"Sounds nice, but I'm still grooving to Centrino and Sonoma," you say? Well, as we all know from reading Laptopical, the Pentium M-based Sonoma platform, released in 2005, was a shiznit of its own. It built upon Centrino technology, released first in 2003, by using an updated Pentium M and a mobile chipset. The Pentium M, however, is a single-core processor, and may have met its match in the two-headed beast called Yonah.

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