The long road to thin and light computing (part 2)
Centrino
Despite some incredible designs made by
companies like Toshiba and Sony, obviously the chasing Moore’s rule is leading
Intel to the unproven path. Therefore, the company has moved from promoting
single-core performance quicker and quicker to use a large number of
transistors which Moore formulated to provide more cores and features on
silicon.
Because of the support of Pentium-M, Intel
launched the most successful brand since Pentium. Centrino is the trademark
attached to systems using chipset, CPU and wireless Intel card. Like Ultrabook,
it’s the way helping Intel sell more products and ensure expectations of what
can be achieved from a mobile product. Centrino laptop will connect with more
and more Wi-Fi routers in the market and have all inherent features in a Intel
chipset (it’s the time cheaper chipset options from VIA and other producers are
used in common).
Wireless Centrino technology is not the
latest and greatest, but what it has is the valuable recognition and the
appropriate test beyond, which makes a consistent experience for the last user.
You can’t underestimate the role of Centrino in the development of Wi-Fi, and
now most of our convenience we have on man devices is from the enforcement of
rules which Centrino has set.
It took several years for Intel to
integrate CPU categories. After that, it transmitted from the Pentium-M to Core
Solo and Duo processor and launched regular update for Centrino at that time.
These Core processors were initially designed to become the CPU of laptop, a
significant deviation from the decrease of desktop designs dominating in the
beginning of this century.
It also includes changing CPU design
philosophy: guide designs to desktops then polish them for laptops. To provide
necessary heat and performance management to create better laptop processors,
designers need to combine things like power management into the CPU. It means
that develop technology by keeping CPU in low power state or as default and
increase power when we need instead of letting CPU come into standby mode.
Sandy Bridge
The change in CPU design philosophy has
become clearer as time goes by. Modern laptops use processors based on Sandy
Bridge of Intel and have many traditional chipset functions to CPU. It’s
important that it composes of integrated graphics core, allow Intel to have
better performance from what have been considered as one of the biggest
mistakes in their argument.
This tightly integrated processor also
marks the top of years of the development of energy management. The processor
mainly stays in sleeping state, use Turbo boost of Intel to wake up quicker,
finish tasks then return to sleeping state. It enables battery lifetime longer
than before, while keeping heat under control. These factors are the key for
the existence of Ultrabook designs, where it’s rare to find any room for
cooling and battery size.
Basically, Ultrabook hasn’t had any
destinations yet, and there’s very few products launched till now. They are
results of many years of development and while they are often thrown away as a
respond to MacBook Air, in fact, thin and light form factor in a cheap package
has become a target for many years. The future has arrived, and as you’ll see,
Ultrabook really changes our expectation of a laptop.
How about AMD?
Despite the success of Sandy Bridge in
2011, our favorite mobile processors actually come from AMD as Llano APU form.
After years of supplying mobile products without impression, AMD has launched a
combination CPU/GPU with power management features and outstanding battery
life. Unfortunately, AMD also had a year when it couldn’t produce enough
processors to meet demand that meant while systems based on APU sold like hot
cakes, they didn’t made any dent in business activities of Intel.
Because Ultrabook is the brand of Intel,
AMD can’t use this term but it is promising many ultra-thin products based on
next generation of Trinity APU in upcoming months. We have seen Llano already,
so we can expect that they will provide battery life as well as products based
on Intel, while supplying less CPU power and better GPU performance. It will
bring more performance to play games in thin and light space, but meanwhile,
Intel will launch overhauled Ivy Bridge processors to come with better graphic
performance in Ultrabook.
