Centrino Generation 6 focuses on "thin and sexy": Intel

Red Bull may well become the official drink at Intel next year, as the chipmaking colossus dives head-first into the biggest set of launches in its four decade history. Over the next 12 months Intel will renew almost its entire line of processors, with much of the action will focus on Intel’s made-for-mobile chips.

Centrino 2-and-a-bit

Notebooks will kick up their heels in the middle of the year with a revision of the Centrino 2 platform, aka ‘Montevina’ to the chip-heads.

“In the Montevina refresh we’re going to deliver faster microprocessors, better graphics and a better video experience, especially on high definition” pledges Mooly Eden, Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s Mobile Platforms Group and considered the father of the Centrino platform and its processor progeny.

New to the Montevina mix will be the ‘Cliffside’ Wi-Fi personal area network technology which can simultaneously connect Centrino 2 notebooks to up to eight nearby wireless devices using hassle-free Bluetooth-style paring. Cliffside, which is due to get a catchier marketing name when Intel officially unveils the technology during the annual Consumer Electronics Show in early January 2009, will be baked into a revision of the Intel’s Wi-Fi Link 5x00 ‘Shirley Peak’ wireless cards.



Cliffside will allow Centrino notebooks to sit at the centre of a personal area network built around Wi-Fi devices, but with the easy pairing of Blueooth

The mid-year refresh is also expected to spur the release of thin and light notebooks – or as Eden more honestly calls the, “thin and sexy”.

“I believe you’ll see a lot of  thin and sexy systems with the Montevina refresh, not because it cannot be done today but because people are trying to refresh for specific cycles” Eden explains. “You have the back to school cycle, you’ve got the holiday cycle, and normally the OEMs are trying to come up with the new SKUs in line with selling seasons. So I believe we’ll see a lot of thin and sexy designs for back to school”. (Note that the US back-to-school sales season typically runs from mid-August to early September).

Calpella: sixth-generation Centrino

By year’s end we’ll see the first wave of mobile processors based on the all-new Nehalem microarchitecture. These will carry a derivative brand similar to the Core i7 moniker which Intel is reserving for its performance desktop chips.

Packing what’s expected to be a substantial boost in both performance and battery life, they’ll provide be the foundation a full revision to the Centrino platform, codenamed Calpella (after a district on the north coast of California). We’re not sure if Intel’s notebook platform will retain the Centrino 2 moniker or switch to the suitably ‘lead ahead’ Centrino 3 brand, but Calpella could be more accurately described as Centrino 6.0.

Showcasing the first working Calpella system a year ahead of its expected production debut, Eden describes the Montevina refresh as an evolutionary step “before you come to the new (Calpella) platform, which is the revolution”.



Mooly Eden, Intel mobility guru and father of the Centrino, demonstrates the first working Calpella-based laptop

Most of the focus will remain on increasing the power efficiency of Calpella notebooks. “Today we’ve got 35 watt CPUs and 25 watt CPUs, but when we go to Calpella everything is 25 watts” Eden says. “So we are taking the overall power one notch down so we can have thinner notebooks.”

The processors will also use what Intel terms an ‘integrated power gate’ to fully disable subsystems which are not being used, instead of leaving them in a low voltage sleep state.

“Each core in Nehalem has a transistor with which we can switch on and off the whole core” Eden explains. “There’s absolutely zero power leakage because it doesn’t get any voltage. This is also used in the memory system, cache and I/O to dynamically power them down when not in use. We wanted to do this (for some time) but we simply didn’t have the technology to do it, and do it automatically ‘on the fly’ until now.”

In keeping with the Nehalem design, Calpella-grade systems will move from being a three-chip package to a two-chip package with the memory controller and graphics integrated into the processor.

“This lets you share the cache of the microprocessor and at the same time save a lot of power, because there’s a lot of traffic flowing between the IO buffers” Eden says.

“One of the things we took advantage of with the 45nm process technology is we could design a huge cache, so if the microprocessor wants data that’s in the cache it doesn’t need to go outside. The cache can hold 90-something percent of the data you want. But in the few occasions that you don’t have it we used to go to the northbridge (memory controller) and then go to the memory. And the situation today is that the microprocessor is so much faster that the time that you take going to the memory, if the cache doesn’t have what you need, is crucial. Now we’re building the memory controller inside so even if you need to get the data from external source it will be much faster.”



Notebook chips built on the Nehalem architecture will share a beefy superslab of cache plus an integrated memory controller and a new QuickPath Interconnect to replace the front side bus

“The other breakthrough is that we are going to put the graphics on the same chip, so it can also enjoy the cache. More importantly there’s a huge amount of traffic between the graphics chip and the microprocessor, and a huge amount of power drawn. If I cut all the IOs and everything because I put it on the same chip, I can save a lot of power.”

Also to come in Calpella will be embedded DisplayPort technology to drive laptop screens plus what Intel terms ‘adaptive snoozing’ for the wireless chip. This allows the radio to adjust its behaviour according to the current task, in much the same way that modern microprocessors can throttle up or down or even enter a number of low-power sleep states during light loads. For example, the wireless transmitter can be put to sleep when all you’re doing is reading a Web page or watching streaming video.

“You’ll very definitely see a power advantage in Calpella” promises Eden. “I believe with Calpella you’ll see notebooks that run for six hours, maybe seven hours in some extremes. You’ll also see more thin and sexy designs coming out”.

David Flynn attended IDF Taipei 2008 as a guest of Intel.