Intel Centrino Mobile Technology Review

Intel today sparks a new milestone by launching a whole new family of mobile processors for the fast growing mobile market and it is not just a typical newer or faster mobile processor that Intel is announcing today but Intel Centrino™ Mobile Technology that will bring joy to the consumers. Intel Centrino™ Mobile Technology is not just a processor alone but it comprises of 3 key aspects that will deliver performance, extended battery life and wireless connectivity and these aspects are clearly the wants of the mobile consumers today.

Introduction

Intel today sparks a new milestone
by launching a whole new family of mobile processors for the fast
growing mobile market and it is not just a typical newer or faster
mobile processor that Intel is announcing today but
Intel Centrino™
Mobile Technology that will bring joy to the consumers. Intel
Centrino™ Mobile Technology is not just a processor alone but it
comprises of 3 key aspects that will deliver performance, extended
battery life and wireless connectivity and these aspects are
clearly the wants of the mobile consumers today. Notebooks based
on the Centrino Mobile Technology are expected to be slimmer,
lighter, last longer, better performance and wirelessly enabled
and it is certainly something to be excited about.

Centrino
Mobile Technology is
made up of 3 key aspects : Pentium-M codenamed "Banias", Intel 855
Chipset family and a Wi-Fi module. Notebooks to be branded as
Centrino will need to satisfy these 3 key aspects, if not, it will
be branded as a Pentium-M notebook with Wi-Fi module from third
party manufacturers other than Intel own Wi-Fi module. Intel has
spent many months validating Centrino mobile technology to work
with the current industry WLAN standards and security matters and
we can expect 3rd party solutions coming out in the near future as
well. For a start, Centrino notebooks will cost above $ 1500 and
will be able to run approximately 6 hours on a full battery
charge.

Although Wi-Fi is
a very important aspect of the Centrino Mobile Technology, the
main brain child is still the Pentium M processor which a totally
new chip that is designed from scratch to be fitted into just into
notebooks. Unlike Pentium III-M and Pentium 4-M processors that
uses the same architecture as desktop processors with some power
saving technologies, Pentium M is architecturally designed to
offer higher performance at a lower clock frequency and consume
less power too. This is a great twist to Intel usual marketing
concept for Pentium processors which is mainly clock frequency
driven therefore Intel will spend around a hefty $ 300 million to
promote and educate consumers on Centrino.

Pentium M with
speeds range from 1.3Ghz to 1.6Ghz will co-exist with the current
Pentium III-M and Pentium 4-M processors and will target mainly at
the "Thin & Light" Form Factor (~25W) and has 1.1Ghz LV and 900Mhz
ULV too for the Mini, Subs, Slates segment (~7-12W). Pentium 4-M
processors with speed range from 1.8Ghz to 2.4Ghz will still
occupy the full size notebook segment (~35W) for some time and
rightfully Pentium M will be replacing Pentium III-M in the "Thin
& Light" and "Mini, Subs, Slates" segment towards end of this
year. Things are unchanged for "Value" segment as Mobile Celeron
will still exist till end of the year unless Intel decide to have
a low end version of the Pentium M with reduced cache in the near
future.

In this article, we will be looking
at 3 key aspects of Centrino Mobile Technology, Centrino notebook
design that features a whole new sleek look, detailed analysis on
gaming performance, rendering power, video encoding, business
applications, content creation, wireless performance as well as
the battery life.