Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 16 July 2008 11:18
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
The new features scream much better performance than 2007’s “Santa Rosa” platform, truly earning this “Montevina” platform the “Centrino 2” label.
To start with, the new Core 2 Duo chips inside Centrino 2 are all based on the 45nm manufacturing process, have a 1066MHz front side bus and up to 6MB o L2 cache.
There are 35w and 25w models and also “Deep Power Down Technology” that turns off processing components such as core clocks and cache memory when the laptop is idle for greater energy savings.
Intel’s new “Mobile Intel 45 Express Chipset”, an intrinsic part of the Centrino 2 platform, features the Intel’s integrated graphics solution called the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, with a graphics core frequency of 533MHz and “up to” 384MB of video memory.
Intel says this delivers major performance enhancements, and includes dramatically improved video quality, giving up to 3x better 3D graphics performance, over 80% faster performance when compressing standard definition video, and up to 90% faster performance when compressing HD video.
In addition, Intel is touting “stutter free” Blu-ray and HD content video playback with this integrated graphics solution, while ensuring that battery life is up to the task of playing a 2.5 hour movie even though the system is dealing with HD video.
It includes native hardware-based decoding of the AVC, VC1 and MPEG video streams to achieve this stutter-free performance, something that is important for the increasing number of Blu-ray equipped notebooks out there and the growing prevalence of HD video encoding and playback.
And even though Intel is touting its vastly improved integrated graphics performance over 2007 models, discrete graphics is still an option for those wanting even better 3D graphics performance.
Although discrete graphics has always been an option, the new feature is the ability to have “switchable graphics”, allowing the use of a discrete graphics chipset (the equivalent of plugging in an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card into a desktop computer) when the notebook is plugged into power, and then when running on battery power, the discrete graphics solution can be turned off in favour of the integrated graphics chipset.
According to one vendor I spoke to, this can deliver a 50% power savings for mobile use, extending battery life when you need it, although letting you keep discrete graphics on if desired.
So, what else is in Centrino 2, what about the business benefits of the Centrino 2 vPro platform, and what ever happened to WiMAX, which was originally promised for this timeframe?
Continued on page 3.
