Click here for information about the PC Advisor Legal Advice Hotline. This review is taken from the April 2001 issue. The faster a processor runs, the hotter it gets. The hotter the processor, the more power it uses. These facts are given and rarely come into play in the desktop PC arena.
Notebooks are a completely different kettle of chips.
As processors become more powerful, it is getting increasingly difficult to keep the size of portables down and battery life up. Power rangers Intel and AMD offer low-power versions of their processors, but internally the designs differ only slightly from their desktop counterparts. Transmeta, which was formed in 1995, set about redesigning the microprocessor with the aim of significantly reducing its power consumption and making it more suitable for mobile devices. Transmeta s Crusoe processor is radically different, although it maintains full compatibility with Intel and AMD products, termed x86 processors. The x86 processor belongs to the Cisc family.