Many of the features required for Basic PC 98 demand significant power and heat dissipation, which will not work physically in the notebook environment. For mobile PC users, the issues of greater importance are portability (weight) and availability (battery life). The mini-notebook, an emerging class of machines, presents new demands with more stringent constraints that also must be addressed.
New external buses, support for multimedia applications, and other changes in PCs challenge mobile PC designers to incorporate the features that users want in a way that does not reduce the value of the core system.
The overall goal for mobile PC design is the same as for PC 98 design—enhanced user experience—but the design tradeoffs are different. This section presents mobile PC requirements in a manner that will encourage industry innovation across a wide range of design solutions without creating extreme power demands. Mobile PC requirements allow OEMs the flexibility they need to manage power and heat considerations in their designs.
Because OnNow and ACPI standards are now spreading throughout the industry, 1998 represents a transition for mobile computing. The new standards allow the operating system to take over the critical operations, such as dynamic configuration and power management, in support of mobile PCs.
The key mobile PC design issues include:
Many of the projected uses for PC 98 computers include CPU-intensive and memory-intensive activities that further stress the power demands on mobile PCs.