Intel developers are already using the T42p/Linux/Cadence solution on a limited basis for engineering and product development functions, with plans for broader deployment in the second half of this year.

A portable system that can handle complex EDA functions is a major step forward, says Guru Bhatia, Intel's general manager of engineering computing. "Engineers will get the flexibility and productivity of Intel Centrino mobile technology with the outstanding performance that Electronic Design Automation software requires," he explains. "This will help accelerate product development cycles so that semiconductor manufacturers can get products to market faster and ultimately be more competitive."

The EDA software specialists at Cadence are just as impressed as IBM with Intel's new silicon. Initial testing with Cadence's Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator showed that the 1.8GHz Pentium M 745 (formerly codenamed "Dothan") CPU delivered a performance gain of 56 percent over the 1.7GHz Pentium M "Banias" (the 0.13-micron version).

Engineers at National Semiconductor are also participating in the pilot deployment of ThinkPad mobile workstations. "We are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way we design our chips, and this shift is being accelerated by the advent of mobile computing," remarks Steven Klass, CAD technical manager at National Semiconductor and chair of the international Cadence user group SysSIG. "Mobile computing enables an environment that untethers our design engineers, which in turn improves productivity and reduces time-to-market. In short, it allows us to design from anywhere at any time."

Not to be shut out of the mobile engineering market, AMD has a line of processors that it says match the Pentium M's power while adding 64-bit compatibility for super-sized datasets. Just this week, AMD announced its fastest laptop CPU to date, the Mobile Athlon 64 3400+. And Tadpole Computer, which has carved out a niche offering Unix and Solaris portables with Sun's Sparc and other processors, has announced plans to ship a mobile workstation based on the Athlon 64's enterprise-server-class cousin, AMD's Opteron.

Alienware, a Miami-based PC builder rapidly expanding from the high-performance gaming to the government, aerospace, and business workstation markets, has confirmed that it'll use the Mobile Athlon 64 3400+ in a new portable platform. The company already sells the MJ-12m, a laptop optimized for digital content creation or video professionals based on Intel's desktop Pentium 4 processor and Nvidia's Quadro FX Go1000 graphics engine, with a 15.4-inch, 1,680 by 1,050-resolution LCD.

As we've said in earlier looks at the mobile workstation segment, the very toughest EAD tasks still call for dual-processor, multi-monitor systems that outperform anything even Intel or AMD can squeeze into a notebook chassis. The Quadro FX Go1000, for example, is Nvidia's fastest mobile workstation graphics product, but the company's own SPECviewperf OpenGL benchmarks rate it about half as fast as the high-end Quadro FX 3400.