Centrino 2 (Montevina) officially announced

By: Klaus Hinum

Intel has just announced the new Centrino 2 platform containing a new chipset with integrated graphics, minimally enhanced Penryn CPU, and new WiFi chipsets.

Centrino 2 Badge

Centrino 2 with vPro Badge

The Penryn CPU operates with an increased Frontside Bus of 1066 MHz. Therefore, the new processors are a bit faster in applications and games. Because of the advanced production process, the current consumption should be lower than the first Penryn CPUs. That is why Intel also could introduce a new class of processors. The P-Series has an TDP of 25 Watt (instead of the 35 Watt of the T-Series). The new flagship CPU of Intel is the Core 2 Extreme X9100 with 3060 MHz, 6 MB L2 Cache, and a current consumption of 44 Watt. A mobile quad-core should come later this year, but was not announced now.

The biggest change of the Montevina platform is the new Intel 4-Series Express chipset family. The new GM45 and GM47 Express chipsets have an integrated GMA X4500HD graphics adapter clocked with 533 and 640 MHz core speed. The core also supports HD-video decoding (Intel aims that a Centrino 2 laptop should be able to play back a full Blu-ray video with one battery filling). The 3D performance of the new GMA also improved significantly compared to the old X3100 (up to 1.8x more performance). Still, the GMA X4500 is not a good solution for gamers, as new games wont run with nice details. A nice new feature is the possibility to switch between integrated and discrete graphics solution (if supported by the laptop manufacturer).

Furthermore, Intel introduced the new PM45 Express chipset without an integrated graphics core. All chipsets support DDR3 (800 and 1066 MHz) and DDR2 (667 MHz and 800 MHz), S-ATA 3.0 GBps, ATI Crossfire (for 2 dedicated graphics cards), TPM, Intel TXT, Intel VT with Directed I/O (VT-d) and RAID 0/1. Especially DDR 3 can increase the system performance a few percent combined with a lower power consumption. The Intel Rapid Recovery Technology optionally (ICH9M-Enhanced) enables the user to easily and quickly maintain backup images of their system.

The new Intel WiFi Link 5000 Series WLAN / WiMax cards complete the Centrino 2 platform. The new Wireless-N cards WiFi Link 5100 (300 Mbps) und WiFi Link 5300 (450 Mbps) should perform faster and work in a larger area around the WLAN router. Optionally, the WLAN cards can also be ordered with WiMax (5050). Because of the supported frequencies, this option is not really suited for Europe, but more for the US market.

For business users, Intel also integrates an improved vPro technology for Centrino 2. This should help the IT department to easily maintain the systems.

Finally, Intel also offers Turbo Memory (now 2 GB) for the Centrino 2 platform. Intel and Microsoft are now working on new drivers for the Turbo Memory (up to now the old Turbo Memory was more or less useless).