Thinner, lighter, cooler

Thinner, lighter, cooler:

Slim, svelte and weighing little over one kilogram - that's the shape of laptops to come. Next year looks set to be the year of "thin and light" notebooks. It's welcome news for anyone who has ever cast an envious eye over Apple's MacBook Air.
The stylish and super-slim Air set the pace and already we've seen similar sylphs from leading players Dell, HP, Toshiba and Lenovo. Maybe not quite as Twiggy-thin but packed with features that Apple ignored such as a CD-DVD drive, memory-card readers and more than a solitary USB port. That's a lot of innovation in the 12 months since the MacBook Air made its debut.
But 2009, say the boffins, is the year these "geek chic" laptops move into the affordable mainstream. They'll be lighter and better looking without cutting corners in either performance or battery life.
The general manager of Intel's mobile platforms group, Mooly Eden, says: "Thin and light, or thin and sexy as I prefer to think of it, will be the next revolution." And he should know. As head of the team that developed Intel's Centrino notebook technology, which spurred the worldwide laptop boom following its debut in March 2003, the animated Israeli engineer and self-confessed "chip-head" is considered the godfather of modern mobile computing.
The evolution of Centrino led to last year's development of a chip that is half the size of a postage stamp yet draws less power than conventional, larger processors. It is this tiny slice of silicon, designed specifically by Intel at the behest of Apple chief Steve Jobs, that makes the MacBook Air possible. Now the technology has been further refined and released to every laptop manufacturer.
But while Eden can shape the silicon that powers our next-gen notebooks, he can also hit the wall of their physical limitations. One of these is the fact that notebooks tend to get hot. The thinner the laptop the less space there is for heat to dissipate - even with a small fan to push warm air out through tiny vents in the side of the notebook's chassis. Much of the heat ends up leaking to the bottom of the notebook.
"People used to call it a laptop because they used to put it on their lap," Eden says. "But when you put a thin laptop on your lap it gets very hot. So you have to keep what we call the skin temperature very cool."
Intel's solution mimics the way jet aircrafts work. The inside of a jet engine can reach 1000 degrees but heat can't leak through the engine wall as it would ignite the fuel stored in the wing.