Intel Centrino: The Day the Laptop Became Truly Mobile

Until today, "portable computing" meant carrying a 7-pound brick with a two-hour battery life and a mess of PCMCIA cards for networking. But Intel has just launched "Centrino," and it’s a radical rethink of what a laptop should be.

Efficiency Over Clock Speed

The heart of Centrino is the Pentium M processor. For the last few years, Intel has been obsessed with clock speed (the Pentium 4 reached 3GHz but ran incredibly hot). The Pentium M takes a different path. It’s based on the older Pentium III architecture but heavily optimized for "instructions per clock."

A 1.6GHz Pentium M can outperform a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 in many tasks while using a fraction of the power. This means laptops can be thinner, quieter, and-most importantly-last for 4 or 5 hours on a single charge.

Wi-Fi as a Standard

The "Centrino" brand isn't just the CPU. To use the sticker, a laptop must also include Intel’s 802.11 wireless chip. By bundling Wi-Fi, Intel is single-handedly forcing the industry to make wireless networking a standard feature rather than an expensive add-on.

# We're moving away from wired commands
# ifconfig eth0 up -> ifconfig wlan0 up

We’re starting to see "Hotspots" appearing in coffee shops and airports. The idea that I can sit in a cafe, open my laptop, and be on the internet without a cable feels like science fiction.

Looking Ahead

Centrino is the death knell for the desktop PC for many people. Once the performance gap closes and wireless is everywhere, why would you want to be tethered to a desk? As a developer, this means I need to start thinking about "disconnected" states and power-efficient code. The mobile revolution has officially begun, and it’s wearing an Intel sticker.