Slashdot Mirror
Intel Announces New, Slower, Chip
kshkval writes "According to Business Week, Intel is marketing the Centrino, a 1.6 Ghz chip that is slower than previous laptop processors from Intel, but does more. Hey, isn't that what Apple and AMD have gotten so much guff about? The worm turns..."
A better built, more efficient chip .. I like it. Though since its winter, I'll stick with my AMD chips to keep me warm.
we don't?!?!
Blarf.
Perhaps now we will see a new wave of marketing, measuring and such from Intel, although I doubt it.
/.ers with their honesty.
They have made a tremendous amount of money due to the ignorance of "moms and dads" who assume that bigger numbers mean faster computer.
They are more typically going to say "yea, but this is for laptops only, they are different" and still focus the race on ghz. I mean, you can't blame them. their job is to make money for their shareholders, not impress
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Is it me or is that logo a two-colored sideways ass? Awful.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Moore's Law doesn't stand a chance!
The Centrino is not a single processor but a "mobile technology" including microprocessor, wireless networking, etc.
Processor is a misnomer.
Cool, what will we get in 40 years? Do we get the ENIAC back? Now _that_ is what I call a computer. Woohoo!
just in time for Valentines day
because nothing says 'you're hot!' like a new processor...
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
They were going to use experimental "Centium" chips, but they smashed them all together accidentally. The results were virtual processors, dubbed "centrinos" by physicists. Make absolutely sure you don't place your centrinos by anticentrinos. Also, the chips have a small mass, and count as dark matter.
Looking at the press release, Intel outlined three priorities:
o extended battery life
o thinner and lighter form factors
o outstanding mobile performance
This is a chip to compete on the Transmeta level, if you will. The message is "If you want better battery life and acceptable performance, buy this."
The megahertz myth is irrelevant here.
Don't let your Centrinos collide with Anti-Centrinos, or you'll get a huge explosion that will rain Pentinos, Athlinos, and other junk.
You think a 1.6Ghz machine isn't snappy? Kids these days...
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Before, the chant was "High MHz good! Higher MHz better! GHz is the best!" Now, since the general public is no longer susceptible to the pimply-faced kid at CompUSA who convinces ma & paw that a 2.4GHz is indeed 17% faster than a 2.0GHz, Intel needs to shift gears and change their tune.
The really sad part about the entire remarketing campaign is that they will get away with it. The general public has a very short memory for these kinds of stunts -- just look at how well Microsoft is doing after countless screwings over of the populace. Windows ME anyone?
The thing to remember is that with enough marketing funds, you can indeed have success even selling snow to eskimos.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
The new Intel Centrino mobile technology brand name will be represented by a new logo carrying the famous Intel Inside® mark. The logo, featuring a striking magenta color and a completely new shape, suggests flight, mobility, and forward movement.
Yeah, either that, or "disposable feminine product"
Intel discovers that size isn't everything...
will work for Karma
A couple years ago I went to an intel sales seminar for retail salespeople (amazing how you can dummy a paystub with photoshop, and a scanner) and halfway through the presentation the trainer threw out "Who knows what iComp is?"
The entire room lost it when I yelled back "A cheesy marketing ploy!"
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
"I for one enjoy a snappy machine."
I would agree with that comment if we were talking about a desktop machine. But we're not, we're talking about laptops, and they're more specialized than desktops.
Laptops are:
1.) Very mobile
2.) Very Powerful
3.) Very efficient with batteries
The catch is that you can only pick two of the three.
See my point?
What a load of fluff. Is there even anything new here? A slower chip which uses less power - shocking! Bundled technology that's already being bundled by every single vendor - wow! I can't even tell from either link whether there is one single thing that's new about the chip other than its slowed core - the retained bandwidth could just be because the FSB is still the same speed.
Beyond that, who writes these ridiculous press releases? "Intel Corporation said today" - yeah, to ITSELF. "CES Virtual Press Kit" really is descriptive of the press these days.
The Business Week writer tries, but can't help the fact that it's a non-story. "Intel's carrot is a new logo" - huh? In what possible way is this a carrot? You could at least argue that the existing Intel logo is recognised, though widely mocked. What possible benefit is there in the new one to a vendor? Another damn sticker on every device? And for this they have to buy a bundle of three things they otherwise could have sourced separately.
It all seems a pathetic smokescreen way of saying "our competitors were right all along - everything we've said against them was bullshit". Also "we're having trouble moving some of this stuff, so you can't buy this less-useless CPU without it - oops well that would be monopolistic, so you CAN buy it separately, you just can't have the logo! By the way, AMD sucks!".
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
* Intel® Pentium® M Processor
* Intel® 855 chipset family
* Intel® PRO/Wireless network connection
Further explaining:
Intel will announce "Centrino with Wings, for those heavy flow days."
Trolling is a art,
AMD said several months ago they are getting out of the megahertz race and focusing on application of technology, meaning doing more with the die space instead of doing faster. Intel is now taking back leadership by...being sure to have a slower chip than AMD that does still MORE with the die space.
The speed race is over. You will continue to hear about who has the fastest, but it will be more "gee whiz" stuff than "I need that" because you just won't need it. Before long you won't be able to even FIND a retail desktop computer that runs over 2Ghz, and when you open the hood it will have ONE chip in it, right in the center of the logic board. In the end probably everything sold as a desktop system will have power consumption below that of today's laptop computers, power supplies the size of a deck of cards, no fan, 1.8 inch HDD, wireless input on all I/O (including the monitor) and the whole thing will fit in a pocket and run for an hour on a built-in backup UPS battery, thus finally bluring the distinction between what is a portable computer and what is not.
Think iPod on steroids, and yes you will use your "portable desktop Pee Cee" to listen to MP3s most of the time, using a wireless headset.
That's just the way it is going folk, because with all the price pressure that is where the profit will be. Besides, all that sounds tre kewl to me!
Give it...what? Two years? Now that the race has turned to "less is more" it might not even take that long. And to the winner go the spoils.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
...but I can't be the only girl who'd rather get hardware than flowers or chocolate.
Can I?
If you had the newer, slower chip, you wouldn't have gotten the first post. Because, as we all know, Intel chips make the Internet go faster.
The "Centrino" which was previously known by the codename "Banias" is the first ever CPU Intel has designed specifically for mobile computing.
It's the combination of the a mutant P3 with the quad-pumped P4 bus, SSE2, lots of power-saving tricks, and an assload of L2 cache (1MB!).
From the limited previews I have seen of it, these things are quite nice, especially with Intel combining the new CPU with mainboard built-in wireless networking adapter. They perform well, and do consume significantly less power than any other mobile chip (excluding the Transmeta CPU, as I have come to the conclusion that they never really existed outside of Japan. Have you seen one in North America?).
"Centrino" is now officially branded Pentium-M...a rather obvious naming strategy IMHO, but a good one. Look out next year, once Intel has its 90nm fabrication process up and running, we should see "Dothan" code-named CPUs...with 2MB L2 cache...mmm
Btw, this news story is old, Slashdot admins, pick up the slack!
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
It's the particle released when you smash together two Apple Centris Macs. Because there aren't many Centrises available anymore, they couldn't use as many Centrinos per chip as they wanted, so they had to drop the speed back down to 1.6GHz.
I can't tell if the Centrino logo looks like a pink triangle or a broken heart.
There is a huge market for slower chips. Slower == less power. Less power is great for mobile computing where the foremost concern is battery life. The XScale is a good example of where slower is better. Why don't they just shrink 400mhz Pentiums and cram them into pocket pc's? Because the XScale uses a tiny fraction of the power that any Pentium uses.
Don't forget also that cooling is becoming a limiting factor in CPU design. Not everybody wants their computer to sound like a jet turbine or have water running through it. As "embedded" CPUs like the ARM and XScale get faster, you may start to see them in more traditionally "desktop" applications. Electricity is expensive and low power computers can save money.
And I still don't understand why everyone equates CLOCK RATE with SPEED. Do people think high frequency EM waves travel faster than slower ones, or something? There are have been MANY examples over the last 10 years of CPUs that get more done at a lower clock rate.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
The Centrino Brand is a combination of three main things.
- The new Banias processor
- The Montara 852/855 Chipset
- Integrated 802.11b
This means that mobile computer makers can make new lighter, faster, cheaper, and colder laptops.Centrino computers are designed for Mobile features, which doesn't always neccesarily mean speed. Banias runs colder than comparable processors from Intel, it has a host of new features to support all the crazy things laptops want to do (Better power management, bus control, hotkey support, more feature rich graphics etc...)
Intel is trying to jump on the new Mobile computing pattern. There is less and less of a focus on the absolute fastest processor and more of a focus on different ways (espeically easier ways) of using your computer. I mean who really uses all of their cpu cycles on a 3Ghz P4 with HT anyway (some people but not most)?
When wireless really picks up and people have reliable, quick, super lightweight laptops that can easily fit in a backpack or briefcase sales might pickup like Intel hopes.
Intel's big problem is the binary compatibility they've stuck with since the 80x86 (more or less). Binary compatibility was important because so much programming was necessary at the assembler level that changing the chipset was prohibitive. This has kept a bad chipset in commission long, long after it should have died.
But then, if you can successfully market clock speed as the sole measure of performance, why bother offering something better?
When are we going to get that blasted 'turbo' button back? You know - the one that reduces processor speed so we can play Space War at sane speeds.
Oh... wait...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Actually i believe a Pentium-4 decays naturally into an Athlon, a Duron, and an anti-centrino.
Jeremy
I cant believe some freak idiot modded your post informative. AltiVec IS NOT MMX. MMX was some stupid extra instructions that resulted in some performance gains for some apps. AltiVec is an incredible advanced vector prossessing unit that doubles or even triples the chip speed.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I would really like to see this aggressive power management available for non-laptop boards.
I currently use a VIA C3 running at 800MHz for my Linux server doing a bunch of tasks ( firewall, VPN, WWW, SMTP, FTP, NTP, Samba, NFS, MySQL/PHP, Answering Machine, etc.). The C3 is about as fast as a Celeron 500MHz. But, it uses very little power and runs cool enough to use only a passive heat sink. With a quiet Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and a quiet power supply fan, the system is nearly silent - which is great in my small apartment.
I would like to be able to use a processor that idled down 90% of the time when it was doing very little. For those few tasks that need CPU horsepower, it could go up to it's 1.6GHz potential, and turn on cooling fans if needed.
Power / Heat / Noise savings apply to the desktop too!
If my application doesn't use more than 60% of the power of one of the low power chips yet has a requirement of long battery life, I'm idiotic to use an Intel anything! Off-loading mpeg decoding or other processor intensive tasks to a task specific chip and reduce cpu load and cpu requirements.
Kinda like using a sledgehammer to pound in a finishing nail. Both will do the job but which one is less likely to cause unwanted side effects? (ie smashed fingers)