Intel’s Centrino 2 Processor Details Leaked

Details of the first few processors belonging to Intel’s latest Centrino 2 mobile platform have been leaked on a PC maker’s Web site, preempting Intel’s official launch of the platform at the middle of this year.

The Centrino 2 platform, codenamed Montevina, is an upgrade to Intel’s current Centrino platform and will include five Core 2 processors running at clock speeds between 2.26GHz and 3.06GHz.

The processors will be offered by an Australian PC maker, Pioneer Computers, in its DreamBook Style 9008 Centrino 2 laptop, one of earliest based on Intel’s latest mobile platform.

The Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor running at 2.26 GHz will include 3MB of cache, and the Core 2 Extreme X9100 processor, running at 3.06GHz processor, will include 6MB of cache.

Other Centrino 2 processors listed on Pioneers’ Web site include the Core 2 Duo P8600 running at 2.4 GHz with 3MB of cache, the Core 2 Duo P9500 running at 2.53GHz with 6MB of cache and the Core 2 Duo T9600 processor running at 2.8Ghz with 6MB of cache.

The chips, which belong to the Penryn family, are manufactured using the 45-nanometer process.

Intel has said that Centrino 2 includes a chip that combines both wireless and WiMax capabilities. Pioneer is offering both capabilities as options with the laptop. The laptop, priced starting at $1,303 supports up to 4G bytes of memory and weighs 2.8 kilograms (6.2 pounds).

At the Intel Developer Forum last year, Intel talked about shrinking the size of chips by up to 60 percent for the Centrino 2 platform. Intel has small-form-factor chips will be released shortly after the normal-sized chips.

Intel Gives Its Classmate PC a Makeover

Intel unveiled an updated version of its Classmate PC laptop at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Shanghai, but changes made to the device are largely cosmetic–at least for now.

The new Classmate PC has a sleeker look than its predecessor, and should appeal to a broader range of users. It also offers the option of a 9-inch screen instead of a 7-inch screen, and can have a built-in video camera.

However, most of the laptop’s internal components remain largely unchanged from the original Classmate PC. The new laptop also retains the soft plastic cover that does double-duty as a carrying handle.

Pictures of the updated Classmate PC slipped out ahead of IDF when a Malaysian PC maker unveiled the device at an event, and pictures appeared online last week. A product sheet for the new laptop was also leaked from a U.S. PC maker, giving observer a first glimpse of the machine.

Like its predecessor, the latest Classmate PC runs Linux or Windows XP and can include specialized software for schools.

One of the most useful improvements to the new Classmate PC design is the location of its memory-card slot. In the first version, this was located behind the laptop hinge and was hidden by the plastic cover.

This slot was moved to the right side of the chassis in the new version, where it remains protected from dust by a rubber cover but is more easily accessible.

The keyboard remains the same size on the new Classmate PC, and most adults will likely find the keys a bit cramped for extended typing. But Intel has added color to the function keys to make them stand out more. In addition, the trackpad is larger, making it easier to use for adult-sized fingers.

Both Classmate PC versions are based on the 900MHz Celeron M processor and available with either hard drives or solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips instead of a spinning magnetic platter. The solid-state drives are available in 1GB and 2GB capacities.

Intel Ups Speed of Quad-Core Processors

Intel unveiled two low-voltage, 45-nanometer server processors.

The quad-core Xeon L5400 Series chips run at 50 watts — or 12.5 watts per core — but their performance still reaches the 2.5-GHz mark. Intel is making the chips using the 45nm manufacturing process that it first used with its Penryn family of chips, which were unveiled last November.

The new chips deliver the same performance as their predecessors, the Xeon 5400 Series, but use 40% less power, according to a company spokesman.

Energy-efficient processors are gaining more attention as companies increasingly look to go green — in order to save both power and money. For companies with large data centers, the cost of electricity can sap a significant portion of the IT budget.

“There is a class of customer that is looking more to economically- or environmentally-friendly designs,” said Stephen Thorne, a product line manager in Intel’s server platform group. “And there also are customers who are trying to pack as much performance as possible into their data center.”

Thorne noted that there has been a call for energy-efficient processors in blade configurations. “A lot of users have power constraints or physical constraints,” he added. “Say you have a fixed space in Manhattan. You can’t expand the space, but with lower-energy processors, you could pack more servers into a rack because each server is using less power.”

In January, Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. disclosed that it was picking up speed on delivering its own energy-efficient quad-core chip, the 9100E, which reportedly uses one-third less power than AMD Phenom chips. The 9100E had been slated on in-house AMD road maps to ship in either the second or third quarter. The chip is now on the docket to be released this quarter.

And the clock is quickly ticking down on the first quarter. So if AMD’s new chip is still on track, it should ship this week.

Intel reported that its new Xeon processors have a 50% larger cache than its previous-generation, low-voltage quad-core Xeon processors. They also have 12MB of on-die cache and dedicated 1333-MHz front-side buses.

Thorne said Intel was able to lower the power consumption on the new chips through a combination of using the 45nm manufacturing process, running them at a slightly slower speed and lowering the voltage across all the cores to parse out the reduction.

Vendors supporting the new Xeon chips include Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM and NEC.

Intel also announced that it expects to begin shipping its L5210 dual-core processor, which will boast a 40-watt rating, a clock speed of 3 GHz, a 6MB cache and a 1333-MHz front-side bus.

Intel Classmate PC Now Available To Consumers

Intel’s Classmate PC isn’t just for students in emerging markets anymore. The low-cost laptop will be made available to companies that want to sell it to consumers in developed countries, an Intel executive said Wednesday.

“During the last quarter, we have seen tremendous interest in the Classmate PC from customers outside education,” said Tom Rampone, an Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s Channel Platforms Group, adding that Asustek Computer’s Eee PC helped stoke wider interest in low-cost laptops.

Originally designed for schools in emerging markets where computer access is rare, the Classmate PC uses a low-power version of the Celeron M processor and a 7-inch screen. Intel is working on a second version of the Classmate PC, earlier revealing plans to use its upcoming Atom processor in the new laptop. Detailed specifications of the device have yet to be revealed.

Intel sees the Classmate PC as just one of a range of low-cost laptops now being developed that the chip maker and others call “netbooks.” These laptops are generally expected to cost between $250 and $300, depending on how they are configured, when they hit the market later this year.

The move to expand the availability of Classmate PC to PC vendors in developed markets follows a push to make the Classmate PC more widely available to consumers in emerging markets. For example, HCL Infosystems of India announced a laptop, called MiLeap X, earlier this year that is based on the Classmate PC design but marketed as a low-cost computer for consumers and businessmen instead of students.

The second version of the Classmate PC will be available to PC vendors in a range of configurations, but will retain the same basic design when sold by different vendors, Rampone said. In addition to versions for consumers, running either Linux or Windows, the laptop will be available in configurations, complete with educational software, aimed at schools in developed countries, he said.

Intel to Shrink Upcoming Nehalem Chips for Laptops

Intel said that its upcoming chip microarchitecture, Nehalem, will first be targeted at servers and high-end desktops but later will be scaled down for laptops.

The Nehalem architecture, a substantial upgrade to Intel’s current Core 2 microarchitecture, will pack between two and eight cores, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of the digital enterprise group at Intel. He did not talk about plans for Nehalem laptops. Intel plans to touch on the subject at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai in early April, a company spokesman said.

Each core in Nehalem chips will be able to execute two software threads simultaneously, so a server could potentially run 16 threads at the same time. Each core will have 256K bytes of L2 cache and a shared 8M-byte L3 cache, so local cores can better execute threads, Gelsinger said. The QuickPath Interconnect will provide improved communication between system components.

The Nehalem architecture will include an integrated DDR3 memory controller that delivers three times the memory performance of today’s highest-performance Xeon processor, Gelsinger said. Nehalem chips will come with an optional integrated graphics controller, Gelsinger said.

Overall, Nehalem chips are designed to deliver better performance-per-watt and improved system performance, Gelsinger said. The chips are due for release in late 2008 and will be made with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process.

The company will follow up Nehalem with the Westmere microarchitecture in 2009 and Sandy Bridge in 2010. Work has begun on microarchitectures to succeed Sandy Bridge, but code-names have not been assigned to those. Intel has said chips will be manufactured using a 22-nm manufacturing process by 2011.

Intel is also working on the Larrabee platform, which will combine lots of cores, lots of threads and graphics capabilities to deliver high speed for the high-performance computing segment, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said at an investor conference in early March. It may bundle a graphics processing unit with the CPU on a single chip, Gelsinger said. Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices plans to launch the Fusion chip, which will combine a graphics processing unit and CPU on one chip, in the second half of 2009.

Intel also said it would ship its first six-core Xeon processor, code-named Dunnington, in the second half of this year. The Dunnington chip will be part of Intel’s Xeon MP 7300 series of processors and will allow a four-processor server to have as many as 24 cores. The chip will have 1.9 billion transistors and include a 16M-byte L3 cache. It will be part of the Caneland server platform, which also includes the Clarksboro chipset.

Intel Plans To Launch 160GB Laptop SSDs

Intel plans to introduce 1.5in and 2.5in solid state drives (SSDs) for laptops offering between 80GB and 160GB storage during the second quarter of 2008.

Intel had demonstrated the high-performance SSD prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. At the time, an Intel spokesman said the manufacturer had not decided whether to sell the drives directly to retailers or through laptop and PC makers.

The spokesman said in January that the solid state technology would be shown off again in April at the Intel Developer Forum, where some observers say it may be officially released.

Intel currently offers ultra-small low-power solid-state storage offerings for mobile devices. These include the 2GB Z-P140 PATA and the 4GB Z-U130 USB offerings. The company has made no secret of its desire to significantly broaden its solid state portfolio along with boosting flash performance for customers.

Last month IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture of Intel and Micron Technology, unveiled a new high-speed NAND flash memory they said offers data transfer speeds that are five times faster than conventional NAND technology.

An aggressive move into the laptop flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba and Samsung who are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months. Samsung said it will ship a 2.5in 128GB SSD in Q2 while Toshiba has announced plans to produce SSDs ranging in capacity from 32GB to 128GB for laptops by May.

Although analysts expect that businesses will begin to seriously consider the benefits of SSDs during 2008, the high price tag for the technology may keep sales in check for a few years.

Atom-Based Notebooks To Cost Between US$250 And $300

More than 25 low-cost notebooks based on Intel’s upcoming Atom processor are in the works, including models from multinational PC vendors, according to the chip maker’s top executive in Asia.

These Atom-based notebooks will be available in the middle of this year for about US$250 to $300, said Navin Shenoy, general manager of Intel’s Asia-Pacific operations, in an interview. “We’ll see some slightly richer configurations that get up to $350,” he said.

The Atom processor, formerly called Diamondville, is a small, low-power chip designed for inexpensive notebooks, a class of device that Intel and others refer to as netbooks. These machines are intended for first-time computer buyers in emerging markets as well as users in mature markets willing to trade performance for a low-cost notebook that complements their existing computers — a market that until now has been largely dominated by Asustek’s Eee PC.

Atom will offer lower performance than Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors for mainstream notebooks, but the Atom’s performance will be good enough for browsing the Internet and sending e-mails, Shenoy said.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner was more specific about the processor’s capabilities, telling reporters that a related chip, called Silverthorne, offers performance similar to Banias, the first version of Intel’s Pentium M processor released in 2003. Silverthorne is designed for small, handheld computers that Intel calls Mobile Internet Devices, and will be available as part of the Centrino Atom chip package set for release during the second quarter.

The introduction of the Atom and the rush of vendors to build the chip into low-cost notebooks could mark the emergence of a new type of device, expanding on the early success of Asustek’s Eee PC. But not everyone is convinced there is much demand for low-cost notebooks, either as a secondary computing device or a substitute for a more capable, and more expensive, notebook PC.

Bryan Ma, the director of personal systems research at IDC Asia-Pacific, is a self-described skeptic and doubts that low-cost notebooks will have more than a limited impact on the market for portable computing devices so long as performance and features are traded for lower prices. “I was never convinced that price was the best way to sell these products,” he said.

But the marketing clout of Intel and top-tier PC vendors could alter this equation by creating additional demand among customers in both emerging markets and developing countries. “Intel, pushing this, gives it more legs,” Ma said.

“There’s going to be some experimentation,” Shenoy said.

Most Atom-based notebooks will have screens ranging in size from 7 inches up to 10 inches, Shenoy said, adding that some models will be equipped with screens that can swivel and lay flat against the keyboard, turning the device into a tablet computer. Devices will ship with either hard disks or solid-state drives that use flash memory and offer battery life ranging from three to five hours, he said.

“Some will be really sleek and thin, some will be a bit more ruggedized,” Shenoy said, adding that Wi-Fi will likely be a common feature.

On the software side, Atom-based notebooks will ship with either Windows XP or some version of Linux. “I don’t think you’ll see a lot of Vista in this space for cost reasons,” he said.

The availability of Windows XP on low-cost notebooks set to arrive during the middle of the year is noteworthy because Microsoft has stated previously that Windows XP licenses will not be sold after June 30. Microsoft officials in Singapore reaffirmed the June 30 deadline in a statement released through the company’s public-relations agency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Windows XP will completely disappear after June 30.

“There are probably going to be certain exceptions here and there,” IDC’s Ma said.