Intel (and Nvidia) Shake Up Notebook Market

Intel Corp. has made its share of lame marketing moves (e.g., the pitch that a "NetBurst" processor, not connection speed, determined one's Internet enjoyment). But ever since its launch in 2003, Intel's Centrino brand-and-bundle campaign has worked brilliantly -- convincing legions of laptop shoppers, hence legions of manufacturers, to look for the label that indicates an Intel CPU, chipset, and wireless network adapter.

Today, Intel officially launched the fourth-generation Centrino platform formerly codenamed "Santa Rosa," and PC makers released an avalanche of new notebooks in both Centrino Duo consumer and Centrino Pro corporate flavors -- the latter being a new mobile counterpart to Intel's vPro recipe for enterprise desktop manageability and security. All told, the chipmaker says, more than 230 portables using the revised platforms are expected to ship this year.

Nvidia Corp. also chose today to introduce a new line of mobile graphics processors, bringing the formidable performance and Microsoft Windows Vista DirectX 10 support of the company's GeForce 8 Series of desktop GPUs to the notebook and mobile workstation market.

New CPUs and Other Silicon

"Santa Rosa" starts with half a dozen new mobile processors -- 65-nanometer-process, dual-core CPUs that support an 800MHz versus older Core 2 Duos' 667MHz front-side bus. The Core 2 Duo T7100 combines a 1.8GHz clock speed with 2MB of Level 2 cache, while models T7300 (2.0GHz), T7500 (2.2GHz), and T7700 (2.4GHz) each have 4MB of L2 cache.

For battery-stretching laptop designs, two low-voltage processors feature thermal design power of 17 watts versus their siblings' 35 watts. These are the Core 2 Duo L7300 (1.4GHz) and L7500 (1.6GHz), also with 800MHz bus and 4MB cache credentials.

All six 64-bit-capable chips feature dynamic front-side-bus frequency switching and an enhanced sleep state to reduce power consumption, as well as Intel Dynamic Acceleration for single-threaded applications and Advanced Digital Media Boost to improve performance when executing streaming multimedia instructions.

The new Mobile Intel 965GM Express chipset brings the desktop i965's Vista Aero-ready Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 integrated graphics to the notebook market (a PM965 version supports discrete graphics). What Intel calls Clear Video Technology mixes high-quality scaling and deinterlacing with hardware decoding acceleration for smoother, more vivid high-definition video playback, while an Intel TV Wizard simplifies the task of connecting a laptop to an HDTV set.

Next-Gen Wireless-N is Intel's phrase for the draft 802.11n WiFi specification that offers greater speed and range than 802.11a/b/g wireless networking. In addition to shipping a quad-mode Wireless Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN adapter, Intel is teaming with wireless router and access-point vendors such as Belkin, Netgear, and D-Link in a new "Connect with Centrino" compatibility labeling scheme.

Some notebooks will incorporate an additional, optional Centrino Duo/Pro feature dubbed Turbo Memory, which dedicates 512MB or 1GB of onboard flash memory to cache frequently used data and reduce hard-disk access. According to Intel, the feature formerly codenamed "Robson" can reduce Windows Vista boot time by up to 20 percent while loading favorite applications in as little as half the time usually required.