Wireless

The third and final piece of the Centrino puzzle is Intel's PRO/Wireless 2100 card. Notebook manufacturers must use this card (along with an 855 chipset and a Pentium-M CPU) in order to be able to call their notebook a Centrino system.

The benefit of being able to brand your notebook Centrino is that the manufacturer now gets access to Intel's marketing dollars in helping to sell their platforms. This effectively keeps other chipset makers out of Centrino notebooks and moves everyone towards Intel wireless solutions.


Intel's Wireless MAC

Intel's eventual goal is to integrate a 802.11b/g MAC into their MCH, meaning that soon enough you won't have a choice for what wireless MAC to use (although OEMs will be able to pick and choose PHYs), so this marketing strategy is more of a short term guarantee that manufacturers will be forced to use Intel's PRO/Wireless solution.

Power Saving Chipsets - 855PM & 855GM Pricing
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  • zigCorsair - Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - link

    I thought it was a very informative article. Of course, I'll be upset if it's biased, but being a master's student in CS, many of the exact details I was looking for were in here, and for that I say thank you.
  • Zebo - Monday, May 10, 2004 - link

    I don't see whats so impressive. An athlon mobile 2600/2800 xp 35W version, which runs ~2000Mhz will kill these. To little to late.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link

    how the hell could this be a balanced and informative article when in their own analysis they ignored their own data?

    There is no mention of the anamolous nature of the BAPCO test..absolutely NOTHING...

    Its enough for me to question the competency of this site...and even to the point where I suspect that certain unethical compromises have been made.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link

    Yeah, I agree with Sprockkets... same reason Athlon XP loses to the P4 in this benchmark... someone was trying to make the P4 look better, and everything else look worse. Now all the sudden, this new great CPU is getting it's but kicked because of all the P4 optimizations (and probably non-P4 deoptomizations).
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link

    I wonder why the P4 trashes the PM on Content Creation Performance and nothing else? Maybe it's the stupid skewing toward the P4. Why else would it lose here and kick butt everywhere else? www.theinquirer.net has an article which brought this to readers attention.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, August 21, 2003 - link

    "Without a trace cache, the design team was forced to develop a more accurate branch predictor unit for the Banias core. Although beyond the scope of this article, Banias was outfitted with a branch predictor significantly superior to what was in the Pentium III. The end result was a reduction of mispredicted branches by around 20%."

    Wouldn't he mean that the branch predictor was superior to the P4?
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - link

    looks good
  • Anonymous User - Friday, August 8, 2003 - link

    An outstanding well balanced article, after this read I feel I really know about Centrino. Thanks

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