The Montevina platform (officially dubbed Centrino 2 today) hasn’t even shipped, but Intel has already given out the codename for its next platform: Calpella (the name of a small community outside of Mendocino County, California, if you must know… Intel allows its engineers to name their projects after their hometown, and then inflicts these endless cryptic codenames on the rest of the world’s tech community.)
Calpella will be based on the Nehalem processor architecture, which is the one that follows the current generation 45nm Penryn CPUs, which have just started shipping in the latest notebooks.
Intel hasn’t given a lot of info yet about Nehalem, but has several sessions at IDF today on it which I’ll be at to get the lowdown.
One of the key features of the Calpella platform is a new wireless chipset with a feature called “adaptive snoozing”, which automatically scales down radio power as low as possible when data isn’t actively transmitting. This is not your notebook’s wireless going into sleep mode after five minutes of inactivity – it is millisecond by millisecond power adjustment. Intel said
Other than that, there’s not a lot we know about it.
However, Intel did elaborate more on Montevina’s capabilities, talking about its graphics performance particularly. The integrated graphics chipset that will ship with it offers nearly twice the graphics performance as before, which will mean a lot more entry-level laptops will be capable of gaming with not appallingly bad framerates.
Intel also said specific HD-DVD and BluRay support in Montevina would guarantee ‘stutter free’ high definition playback, and would also allow a full length 2.5 hour HD movie to be played on a single battery charge.
The Montevina platform will also have native DisplayPort and HDMI with HDCP support (though it remains to be seen how many notebooks will actually ship with the ports.)
Dan Warne travelled to IDF Shanghai as a guest of Intel.