TWO weeks ago, United States semiconductor giant Intel surprised the industry by launching two new, blisteringly fast versions of its popular 486 microprocessor.
With barely enough time having passed to produce the marketing material, Compaq, Texas Instruments and Toshiba have all announced new high-end notebook systems in Hong Kong, based on the 75-MHz version of these so-called 486 DX4 processors.
To be fair, in Hong Kong, at least, the marketing material is all that exists. None of the firms that announced the products actually has stock.
AST has played its launch more conservatively. A spokesman said last week that DX4 machines would be on sale soon, but the firm was waiting to see that stock was in place first.
As is often the case at the notebook end of the market, there is not much that distinguishes one product from another. Certainly, price will not - they are all in the $40,000 to $48,000 range, the upper stratosphere of the notebook market (but one that accounts for a reasonable number of unit sales in Hong Kong, regardless).
Toshiba's new system, called the T4800CT, comes with various multimedia features that take advantage of the processor's speed. These include built-in audio, local bus video and a graphics' accelerator.
In catering to the heavy storage demands of multimedia applications, Toshiba included a 500-MB disk drive for the first time. The 500MB is expected to become a standard notebook offering across the industry in the next few years.
