Intel Centrino technology

What advantages does the Intel Centrino laptop offer?
What does the 7xx number mean?
How fast is the Centrino CPU compared to other processors?

The advantages of the Intel Centrino technology.

What Intel told us: "With Intel Centrino mobile technology, three components work together to enable outstanding mobile performance, extended battery life and integrated wireless LAN capability in thinner and lighter notebooks. These components include the Intel® Pentium® M processor, the Intel® 855 chipset family and the Intel® PRO/Wireless Network Connection Family."

What does this mean?
Centrino™ is a technology and not the name of the processor. Centrino™ technology consists of three parts which must be present for a laptop to be Centrino™ certified. The first is the use of Intel Pentium M processors, which deliver higher mobile performance and extended battery life, the second is the use of Intel's 855 chipset and the third is the use of Intel PRO/Wireless Network.

In plain english this means that Centrino laptops will be able to deliver superior performance at lower clock rates, while extending the battery life to the max. This allows for smaller batteries, and lighter and thinner laptops. Centrino certified laptops can operate continuously for several hours (2.5 up to 6 hours) depending on the battery rating, the laptop's use, the configuration and the other components that impact on power.

The Centrino laptop has 802.11 wireless network and has a PRO 10/100 network by default. This allows connectivity through a wired network or to other wireless computers, hubs and certain hardware, such as PDAs. You will be able to connect to "hot spots" using your own laptop, such as at Airports and Internet cafe's. Our ComX offices is wireless and allows users to connect directly to our network and Internet using a secure password.

What do the 7xx numbers mean?

Intel has numbered their Pentium M processors using the 700 series of numbers. A description and comparison of each processor is given below.

The architecture - the smaller this size (in nanometers) , the more compact the processor is made (more transistors can be fitted onto a chip) - this means more memory, more logic circuits and higher clock speeds are also made possible.

Cache - The larger the cache size, the better the performance, but with only marginal gains on CPU intensive applications (such as encoding), it is great for normal bussiness applications.

FSB - The FSB speed impacts on overall system performance since this is the speed at which the entire system runs at. 400MHz is an excellent speed for today's applications and even games, as this directly impacts on video speed, memory speed, and the speed of all the other components in a system.

Processor Name	Architecture	Cache	Clock Speed	Front Side Bus
Intel® Pentium® M processor 755	90 nm	2MB L2	2 GHz	400 MHz
Intel® Pentium® M processor 745	90 nm	2MB L2	1.80 GHz	400 MHz
Intel® Pentium® M processor 735	90 nm	2MB L2	1.70 GHz	400 MHz
Intel® Pentium® M processor 725	90 nm	2MB L2	1.60 GHz	400 MHz
Intel® Pentium® M processor 715	90 nm	2MB L2	1.50 GHz	400 MHz
Intel® Pentium® M processor 705	130 nm	1MB L2	1.50 GHz	400 MHz

Compare the performance of the Centrino processor to other processors

The Intel Pentium M processor has various technical differences compared to the standard desktop processor. While the clock rates are lower, the design of these processors are such so as to optimise performance. Larger cache sizes and different technologies internally allow the processors to deliver higher performance at these lower clock rates. Lower clock rates also allows for lower power consumption, maximising battery life. More information is available on the Intel performance brief .

Performance on popular desktop software - your mobile experience

Mobile Experience: MobileMark* 2002

MobileMark* 2002 is a benchmark used to evaluate notebook PC user experience by measuring both performance and battery life at the same time on the same workload. MobileMark* 2002 is a tool that measures notebook PC performance on popular business-oriented applications in the Microsoft* Windows operating environment. The productivity usage model provides computations representing today's business users using popular office productivity and content creation applications. This usage model reports a performance score and a battery life score.

Download the full Intel performance brief here (343Kbytes)