Conclusions
Intel claimed more than 240 design wins for Centrino 2, stating that notebooks should be on their way to shelves within the next few weeks. The platform is coming to desktops, too. Eden showed off a Montevina-based desktop roughly the size of a Western Digital MyBook external hard drive.
Given that mobile Penryns are already on the market and WiMax support isn't due until later this year, Centrino 2 isn't as exciting as some would have hoped. Still, it's a solid evolution of the platform, and it presents a clean break from its predecessors, standardizing on a set of features that aren't yet available from AMD. We already know that CPU performance is there, and the HD video decoding capabilities of the GM45 are an important step forward on the graphics front. But 802.11n and particularly WiMax present their own challenges, and it will be interesting to see if Intel's widespread adoption—particularly of WiMax—can force these technologies into the existing market space, where multiple draft-n solutions are already competing against the incumbent 802.11g. WiMax in particular requires new infrastructure, so it becomes a question of whether or not it's going to be the next big thing or a footnote in Intel's history, similar to RDRAM on the first-generation Pentium 4s.
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Last post by scpulp at 2:48 PM on July 18, 2008 - Email the author(s): Dustin Sklavos
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