Centrino: High Performance, Great Battery Life and AMD Can't Drive a Truck Through Gaps in Our Product Line Anymore

It was a nice try, but AMD’s Better by Design event last week seems not to have rained out Intel’s Centrino parade so much as give it a bit of a sun shower. The chipmaker launched the “Santa Rosa” upgrade of its Centrino notebook platform yesterday, one that delivers up to twice the performance of earlier Centrino platforms, extended battery life, faster boot time and support for the draft version of 802.11n wireless networking that offers theoretical transfer speeds of up to 300 megabits per second at twice the range of 802.11g solutions. Impressive, eh? Certainly formidable enough to ensure its debut on machines from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo Group, Gateway and pretty much any other PC manufacturer you can think of.

Clearly, Intel is regaining the performance and price/performance leads it needs to reverse its market-share decline and is beginning to deliver on the promise CEO Paul Otellini (shown above right in ceremonial bunny suit) made at the Intel Developers Conference in San Francisco last year. “Much has been written in the last year about Intel losing its momentum, losing its leadership in the server market space,” he said at the time. “I believe very much that with this new set of dual and quad-core microprocessors, we’ve now regained our leadership.” Yes, yes, yes–wonderful. Now get back to work on that 80-core teraflop chip …