Centrino 2 (Montevina) = Price drop on current Centrino

pkphilip

Anybody notice that laptops are relatively cheaper than ever lately? Look at Dell's high-end XPS systems, most of them are within $2000 (large screen) and the common M1330 are as low as $1299 with some impressive specs. Even HP and Sony can offer T7 and T8 series CPU on many of their notebook at $1500 or less (many under $1000). Just looking at the CPU itself, the T7 and T8 series cost over $500 alone.

Laptop pricing seems to be in its all time low now. After some investigation on the Intel's beta section, I noticed Intel is now testing the Centrino 2 chipset publicly. That include the new GM45, GM47 or PM45 (codename Montevina) and the new 5100, 5150 WiFi card. This mean, things will get outdated very soon.



Intel expects to ship Montevina to OEM by Summer to meet the demand in Aug/Sep season. Some of the highlights for Montevina include: Penryn (45nm) CPU that runs even cooler, greener, up to 1066Mhz FSB, DDR3 support, and Wireless N card with WiMAX integrated. The most important thing for consumer, is the ability to have quad-core CPUs X7 and X9 series CPUs on laptops without sacraficing battery life and weight.

This release date seems to corrspond with the rumored release time for the new Macbook/Macbook Pro/iMac, whose is known to get the first dip on Intel's new stuff.

On a personal note, it seems Intel has accelerated the product refreshment cycle to be on par with the desktop counterparts. A move to lead further away from AMD to the top of the mobile market?

Again, performance increase from Santa Rosa (Centrino) to Montevina would be dismal. If you plan to get a laptop for cheap, these are the time as OEMs are probably working on new models already.

Intel will also relase the ATOM CPU, hopefully we will see it on the new EEEPC 900 in June. The ATOM is even smaller and design primary for mobile PDAs and sub-notebooks.

Philip

[ 本帖最後由 pkphilip 於 2008-5-14 23:44 編輯 ]