Intel’s Centrino ushers in new age of wireless mobility

Intel’s worldwide release of its new Centrino portable processor last week was not a mere product launch but the ushering in of a new era in wireless portable computing.

New microprocessors that deliver higher performance while consuming less power have been an emerging segment catering to the increasing number of mobile PC users who rely greatly on notebooks and sub-notebooks for business and personal productivity.

Intel’s Centrino is positioned to compete directly with Transmeta’s low-power mobile Crusoe processor and Advance Micro Devices’ AMD Athlon XP-M mobile – alternative processors seemingly positioned toward the lower consumption, higher processing power mobile segment.

Intel’s Centrino is also designed to take advantage of emerging wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and new sub-notebooks and TabletPCs running on the processor that can optimize both connectivity as well as battery life.

Intel Mircroelectronics Phils. country chief Ricky Banaag said, "There is a desire to unwire. We are at the tipping point, where we aim to unwire the world." Banaag noted that even as many users already use portable PCs, many are still enslaved to desks in order to be connected to phone lines and power outlets, defeating the purpose of the slim and lightweight notebooks meant for use anywhere.

Wireless Internet access is still in its early phase as there is only a handful of Wi-Fi hot spots locally that support access. Moreover, laptop battery life has yet to reach breakthrough levels with most laptops doing two to three-and-a-half hours on a full charge, hardly enough to power a six- to eight-hour workday without plugging in.

"We did a study and asked users what they wanted and 37 percent of the respondents said they want to be unwired," Banaag explained during last week’s Centrino launch.

Banaag also demonstrated the new technology by running his entire presentation wirelessly, connecting to a Wi-Fi network and running on his Centrino-powered laptop battery.

Centrino’s architecture merges Intel’s energy-efficient Pentium-M chip with a Wi-Fi chip that supports the 802.11b wireless networking standard and in the near future, the speedier 802.11a/b standard.

The processor’s variants range from a 1.3 GHz model to a 1.6Ghz model. Unlike earlier mobile processors from Intel, Centrino will run at full processor speed at all times. The mobile Pentium III and Pentium IV processors employed Intel’s SpeedStep technology to control performance in order to maximize power consumption.

Notebooks running on Centrino processors from Compaq, ASUS, IBM and other vendors are expected to be released within the next few weeks. Most of them will boast of increased battery power as well as built-in wireless capabilities in slim and sub-portable form factors.