Intel's "Santa Rosa" may outshine AMD's "Turion"

US chip giant Intel Corp. on Wednesday launched their next generation notebook platform, with two new brands, Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro for consumers and business users, respectively.

With an updated Centrino notebook platform, formerly code-named Santa Rosa, the world's largest computer chip maker that has seen strong sales for its original Centrino platform is making attempts to stay ahead of its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The upgrade to its popular Centrino chip set for notebook computers is far more energy-efficient, uses a faster processor and features much improved graphics, running on PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo Group, Gateway, and others, Intel said yesterday.

"When we introduced Intel Centrino 4 years ago, Intel changed the computing landscape with our mobile innovations," said Mooly Eden, Intel vice president and general manager, Mobile Products Group. "Now, simply said, we have improved virtually all aspects of Intel-based notebooks, the most popular and fastest growing computing market segment in the world."

Some parts of the Santa Rosa processor were developed at Intel's three development facilities in Israel (at Jerusalem, Haifa and Petach Tikva), which also developed the original Centrino processor, introduced for notebook computers four years ago.

The "Santa Rosa" upgrade of its Centrino notebook platform adds longer battery life and faster computing to the technology bundle of a processor, chipset, and wireless card. It includes Core 2 Duo processors, its first dual-core processors optimized for laptops, support for the draft version of 802.11n wireless networking and a Turbo Memory feature that supplements the standard hard drive with NAND flash for faster booting.

A new graphics chipset will enable smooth high-definition video. "Probably the thing most people will notice is the graphics controller, for better video capability," said Mike Trainor, Intel's chief mobile technology evangelist. That will earn the new platform high marks from video gamers and DVD watchers, since improved color control will make the monitor show images nearly as sharp and bright as a TV set, he said.

The new chip set also supports a new version of Wi-Fi that Intel officials say can be five times as fast as the existing version and can communicate over twice the distance. The latest launch of Centrino chips would offer 44 per cent better performance than last year's releases, Mr Eden informed.

The business version of Santa Rosa, Centrino Pro, will feature management tools that will help IT departments fix and monitor employees' laptops remotely, inspecting faulty PCs or adding software patches over wireless links.

Users of the new Intel Centrino Duo and Intel Centrino Pro processor technology-based notebooks will experience improved performance when running multiple applications simultaneously such as downloading a video clip while performing a virus scan.

Last week, AMD demonstrated new features of its Turion notebook processor held at a news conference in San Francisco. It also showed a branding campaign with the theme Better by Design. Besides a longer battery life, the new AMD notebook technology offers improved graphics stemmed from the graphics developer ATI, which was acquired by AMD last year.

On Wednesday Intel has also announced more than 230 design wins for the Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro processors in notebooks varying from 17-inch, wide-screen models to tiny notebook PCs that weigh less than 3 pounds.

Dell announced its plans to use Centrino Duo in the new D630 thin-and-light notebook and the D830 high-performance notebook introduced on Wednesday, replacing the previous models D620 and D820, while Lenovo unveiled the ThinkPad T61 with Centrino Pro and ThinkPad R61 with Centrino Duo, both with 14-inch widescreen displays and reduced surface temperature and fan noise.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) also unveiled its plans to launch Centrino-based notebooks, supporting Centrino Pro on its HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p and 6910p business notebooks.