A Preview of Intel's Centrino 2 Platform

The CPUs

Centrino 2 launches with basically the same 45nm Penryn Core 2 Duos that have been shipping since the beginning of this year, the only difference is that these chips run off of a 1066MHz FSB (up from 800MHz in Santa Rosa Penryn). As far as we know there have been no architectural changes to the Montevina Penryn chips, they just have a faster FSB and do benefit, in some cases, from lower TDPs which we will explain later.

Centrino 2's 45nm CPUs remain largely unchanged from those that launched with the Santa Rosa Refresh earlier this year

The Centrino 2 launch lineup is below:

Given that the only performance-impacting change here is the FSB speed bump, honestly there's no reason to expect a Centrino 2 with a T9400 to perform any differently from a Centrino Duo with a T9500. The 1066MHz FSB is nice, but will most likely only make a small difference with the upcoming Core 2 Extreme QX9300 - Intel's first quad-core mobile CPU, which isn't due out until later this year (2.53GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 12MB total L2 cache, 45W TDP).

The CPU pricing is actually even more aggressive than Santa Rosa Refresh Penryn parts, for comparison here are the older chips:

The new T9600 gives you an extra 200MHz at the same price, while the P8600 and P8400 give you virtually the same performance, but lower TDPs at the same price. The new 25W TDPs are particularly interesting since they drop power consumption at the same clock speeds and are available in speeds up to 2.53GHz.

The entire Core 2 mobile lineup with the new Montevina chips is below: