If you need professional-class performance, Intel
Chip rules. Here’s an overview to help you decide which notebook best meet your
needs.
Who hasn’t
heard of the Pentium? According to Simba Information, Intel has spent more than
$100 million on advertising in the United States alone over the last two years.
Worldwide in the same period, the total advertising and promotion expense adds
up to nearly a billion dollars!
The fact
that people actually care what kind of microprocessor runs their computers is a
marketing marvel borne of this advertising effort. So is the fact that
practically no one remembers that the initial Pentium chip was once roundly
criticized for its inability to do certain mathematical operations correctly. The
“Intel Inside” and Pentium advertising
blitzes have saturated the public psyche. User may not know what processors do,
but they seem to believe that Intel’s are the best.
The IBM/Motorola
Power PC chips found in Power Books and few ThinkPads are just as fast as Pentium
with a similar clock rate, but they don’t do Windows. Not yet, anyway. AMD and
Cyrix have developed rival processors, but they have failed to match Intel’s
break neck pace of technological innovation. Even when they do generate a
competitive technology, breaking into an industry already standardized for
Intel hardware is daunting.
So when it
comes down to it, the odds are your next notebook will use an Intel chip.