Who Wants a Pentium III DDR Laptop?
Earlier this week, VIA Technologies announced the PN266T, the first DDR chipset for Intel’s Pentium III-M mobile processor. This chipset looks pretty good on paper, with DDR266 support, a 133MHz front-side bus, S3 ProSavage8 integrated graphics, and a 266MB/sec V-Link system architecture. Indeed, it sounds like something you’d cheer in a new integrated desktop, let alone a notebook PC. Following the company’s KN266 DDR chipset for AMD’s Athlon 4 and mobile Duron processors, the PN266T represents a clean DDR sweep for VIA. Now that the PC desktop is practically DDR-only, it seems the laptop market isn’t far behind. This is good news in some ways, but the current level of DDR tunnel vision is really starting to worry me — especially the illogical nature of the PN266T release. VIA’s endorsement of Pentium III-M DDR laptops is a tad strange, given that previous forays into P-III DDR desktops made virtually no impact on the market. It all comes down to performance, and the old Pentium III
