New Intel Chips Offer Prospect of Book-Sized PCs

Intel Corp. announced Monday a new set of products that it claimed would “revolutionize” portable computing by enabling notebook-sized computers to tap the latest available software.

By consolidating onto two chips the 17 chips required to operate most personal computers, Intel said it has made it possible to build a top-of-the-line, 32-bit International Business Machines-compatible computer on a board the size of a small date book.

The new products will also extend the battery life in the typical portable computer by 50%, helping to make the machines more functional for day-to-day use.

“Today’s notebook computers don’t cut it,” said Intel Chief Executive Andrew S. Grove.

Not only are current machines too heavy and their batteries’ lives too short, Grove said, but they also use older microprocessors that cannot easily exploit the latest software available, such as Microsoft’s Windows.

Grove said the new chip sets, based on the company’s more advanced 80386 microprocessor, would spawn a new generation of products that would do so well they could account for up to half of all Intel’s chip sales in unit terms by 1994.

Japanese manufacturers said they hadn’t seen the Intel product yet but were eager for anything that would help them make smaller computers.

“We are very interested in taking a look at the product,” said a spokesman for Toshiba, the leader in portable computer sales in the United States, with a 26% share of the world market.

Portable computers accounted for roughly 10% of the 22.2 million personal computers sold last year, but will account for about 37% of the 40 million personal computers sold in 1994, according to Dataquest, a technology market research firm.

It is unclear how much of that market will be in laptops and how much will be in the lighter notebook-sized products, but Intel expects to get a major share of both markets.

Many current portable computers use technology based on Intel’s 16-bit 80286 microprocessor. (The more bits, or binary digits, that a chip can handle, the more powerful it is.) Japanese manufacturers such as NEC Corp., manufacture microprocessors compatible with that chip.

Most experts, however, expect future personal computers to standardize on the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Since that technology is proprietary, it would be an “exceedingly difficult task” for competitors to build chip sets as well integrated with the microprocessor as Intel’s new product, said Dave House, president of Intel’s microcomputer components group. It is “inevitable” that Intel will control more and more of the electronics in the personal computer as it becomes increasingly integrated with the microprocessor, House said.

Intel also announced what it called the world’s first flash memory-based cards--packages of semiconductor memory chips that look like thick credit cards and are inserted into a computer in place of floppy discs and disk drives. The cards will allow manufacturers to make slimmer, lighter notebook computers.

Monday’s announcement was Intel’s first from Japan. While only 10% of Intel’s sales now come from Japan, the company is making an aggressive effort to boost its sales here, House said. The new products, he said, were a response to specific demands from Japanese producers for small, light chips that consume less energy.

Tokyo was also an appropriate place for the announcement because most analysts believe that Japan’s skill at miniaturizing products will enable it to dominate the notebook computer market.

Separately, Compaq Computer Corp. on Monday introduced a new notebook-sized personal computer that experts say will give the company an edge over the competition in laptop models.

The new model from the Houston-based personal computer maker uses several innovations to squeeze its electronics, including a 20 megahertz Intel 386SX microprocessor, into an 8 1/2-by-11-inch, 7 1/2-pound machine.

Compaq said the computer uses technology originally developed for the defense industry. The technology allows the computer’s circuit board to fold in half to take up less space.

Compaq calls the new LTE 386s-20, introduced at a news conference in New York, the highest performance “notebook” computer on the market.