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.

Sahara Launches an 8 Inch Laptop

Sahara Computers launched its latest entry level 8 inch laptop — Sahara- S- NB522434- EB00 in the Indian market.

This latest model, a new addition to Sahara’s Image Book Series, is an entry level product which comes with lots of features. The company claims it to be one of the smallest notebooks with 60 GB hard drive. The 8 inch LCD TFT display screen is bright and sharp. It weighs about 1.1 kg.

The laptop is a Linux based notebook, focused for entry level users, students and frequent travelers, it comes with AMD Geode LX 800 Processor. It has an extended battery life of respectable 4.5 hrs. It is a Wi-Fi enabled notebook and has a PCMCIA slot, card reader which comes with one year carry-in warranty. It is offered with a leather carry bag.

Sahara- S- NB522434- EB00 is available for Rs. 14,999. It is available in India through Sahara Computers’ authorized channel partners and all ITJ stores.

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.

Sony Unveils Wall-Mountable VAIO Notebook

Sony has added to another notebook in their VIAO lineup with the release of the VAIO LM notebook.

The VAIO LM features PC design reminiscent of Sony’s BRAVIA LCD TV’s with its 19-inch screen framed by a transparent bezel. The new laptop can be wall-mounted and features wireless keyboard, mouse and remote control.

Aimed at those who want the functionality of a PC in their living area, the VAIO LM is designed as an entertainment hub that doubles as a TV, with in-built TV tuner, built-in 1.3MP camera with face-tracking software, 2.1-channel speaker system and sub-woofers.

The VAIO LM features an Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7250 (2.00GHz), 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 250GB HDD, Windows Vista Home Premium, and nVidia graphics card. The laptop comes with the latest VAIO Music Box software, it lets users define default channel capacity for music in advance, so that the system is able to automatically select signal descriptors for sound classification into 24 channels. Besides, VAIO LM new Movie Story software allows users to create and edit their own video easily.

The VAIO VGC-LM18 is available across Sony stores for Rs.1,09,900.

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.