Kevin Lynch Archives

Intel Centrino

Today Intel announced their new Centrino mobile technology. It has 802.11b wireless is built into the chip set, so you no longer need to have separate PC cards for the network. One of the current ironies of "wireless" computing is that you still need a wire to plug into the wall for power after a couple hours. The Centrino chipset is designed to run at dramatically lower power, so you should soon be able to use your computer all day rather than just a few hours, really wireless.

A challenge with running at lower power has been reduced performance, and Centrino has some clever tricks to keep the machine running quickly at low power, such as predictive instructions. So, even though the chips are running at lower speeds, performance is actually better.

This is a very positive development -- I'm hopeful that we'll start seeing more applications take advantage of this mobile, location aware, occasionally connected computing model. We're certainly going to our part to help enable this!