Intel Announces The Centrino 2 Platform

The Intel Centrino 2 Summary

The above slide shows how Intel improved performance on all the mobility vectors and gives you some percentages of what the performance increases should look like.

In summary, Intel today launched Centrino 2, its latest mobile platform, which Intel claims will increase laptop battery life while delivering better performance and faster wireless connectivity. Intel says that over 250 notebooks are in the works and will start hitting store shelves in August. Of the upcoming ~250 Centrino 2 notebooks that are coming out roughly 30% will feature discrete graphics and the other 70% will feature integrated graphics. Both NVIDIA and ATI brand video cards will be used for discrete graphics and multi-GPU support is available in the form of CrossFire and SLI for those looking to build a Centrino 2 gaming laptop. Those not needing discrete graphics will be using the new GMA X4500MHD integrated graphics processor. The new chipset supports DirectX 10, which is a first for Intel mobile chipsets.

To conclude our story on the Intel Centrino 2 launch we have the pricing info for you, which is hands down one of the most important things with any launch. The above chart also shows the details on the six new 45nm Penryn processors that are being announced today. The new processors will include the Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz), P8600 (2.40GHz), T9400 (2.53GHz) and the T9600 (2.80GHz). The chips will offer 6MB of L2 cache and a 1066MHz front side bus (FSB) compared to the 800MHz FSB of the previous refresh.

The Intel Centrino 2 platform will be around for some time and it doesn’t look that will be a bad thing at all!