The announcement is expected to be made in the US next Monday, and heralds the first time the Pentium 4 mobile chips break the 2 GHz barrier. This will see the 1.6GHz drop off the market, and should also end the practice of using desktop P4's in notebooks.
Laurie White, product marketing manager for Toshiba's information systems division, told ZDNet Australia that Toshiba would have laptops with the 2 GHz chips in stores on the day of the announcement.
-With a chip of this speed the biggest challenge is keeping the notebook cool but keep the fan down so it doesn't suck out the battery life," said White. The Toshiba information systems division collaborated with other Toshiba businesses, such as building refrigerators and ventilation systems in Japans road tunnels to achieve this.
Jeff Morris, business development manager for Dell's Latitude series, said: -We've been first to market with any processor and we don't see that changing in the future."
Dell's model of building to customer specifications means they provide a range of processor speeds in each model, and will add the new chip as an option to the high-end models.
David Nicol, mobile computing brand manager for IBM, commented -IBM works very closely with Intel to ensure we incorporate the latest technology in our ThinkPads. We will have 2GHz-M processors in our ThinkPads very soon after the announcement of these processors by Intel."
In desktop processor news, AMD this week introduced the Athlon MP processor 2100+, designed to support 2.1 GB per second per CPU of bus bandwidth, going for US$262. Last week Intel released the 1.8 GHz Celeron processor for US$103.
The next P4-M chip is expected to be 2.2 GHz, and to come out in the fourth quarter.
