Bennett Ring02 June 2008, 2:00 PM
Intel Australia confirms impending launch delayed due to "minor problem".
Intel’s Centrino 2 platform has been delayed from its June launch until the 14th of July, due to undisclosed issues with the GM45 and GMM47 chipsets. We dropped a line to Intel Australia’s Public Relations Manager, Anna Torres to see what the extent of these issues are.
Though Ms Torres wouldn’t be drawn on what the exact problem was, she was quick to claim that it’s a relatively small issue. According to Ms Torres, “it’s a minor problem, we’re taking a couple of weeks to recheck them… It’s an important launch and we’re taking the time to ensure that we’re at a high state of readiness.”
When asked if the delay would have an impact on pricing or performance, Ms Torres’ soon cleared up any concerns, saying “This won’t incur a price hike or performance drop.” It’d have to be a serious problem to dampen the enthusiasm we have for Intel’s new mobile chipset, especially considering early benchmarks are showing stellar integrated graphics performance.
Website Notebook Journal.de released benchmarks earlier this month purporting to show the X4500 graphics chip in action. In both World in Conflict and 3DMark 2006, the X4500 showed a performance increase of around 70% over the older Intel X3100 chip. However, the same benchmarks showed that NVIDIA’s 8400M chipset is still the ruler of the mobile roost, performing around 30% faster than Intel’s new chip. It should also be noted that even with the X4500’s performance increase, judging by the disappointing WiC benchmark results, most current games are going to run as slowly as a Valium-fueled sloth.
There have also been rumors abounding that Centrino 2 will utilise solid state hard drives, but when pressed on this, Intel said they’d get back to us. We’re not holding our breaths for a reply, but with the official unveiling of Centrino 2 at Computex in a few short days, we don’t have long to wait for confirmation. (Intel did show a range of Intel-branded flash hard drives at the most recent IDF in Shanghai, laying credence to the rumour, but most likely, this will simply be an option for top-end Centrino 2 notebooks rather than a mandatory requirement.)