Sony Style has posted a teaser on its front page promising that the company’s going to drop some knowledge on Monday at 9PM. Chances are, it’s about Sony’s new Centrino 2-based VAIO line, which should offer better performance while consuming less power than its older models. Laptops rumoured to be featured include the company’s first 16:9-ratio notebooks, including the 13.1-inch VAIO Z and the 16.4-inch VAIO FZ. [Electronista]
If your head’s spinning from the buckets of chip splooge that’s shot out over the past couple days, we don’t blame you. There’s been a new mobile chip launched or announced by every major player in the biz (Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Via), so no wonder it’s all sticky and running together. Don’t worry, here’s a quick guide to what matters, who makes it, and what kind of stuff you’ll see it in.
Intel’s Senior Technical Marketing Engineer for Corporate Demonstrations Craig Raymond had his lucky hands all over the new ASUS M51VA Centrino 2 (“Montevina”) portable at a pre-Computex demo session today, and—delay or no delay—he came away loving the freedom of Intel’s new chip and WiMAX. Sure, he’s an Intel guy talking about an Intel-equipped laptop, but he sounds like he put the thing through the paces, starting with a highly scientific test using World of Warcraft.
Yesterday’s report that Intel’s highly anticipated Centrino 2 chipset was being delayed by issues with the integrated graphics and a wireless certification boo-boo was right on the money. Intel confirmed it today, with a soft launch July 14 of the Centrino 2 sets using discrete graphics and their new mobile processors, followed by a full rollout of the whole shebang in August. [PCMag]
TGDaily is reporting that Intel’s next-gen Centrino 2 platform (aka Montevina) has hit a series of snags and won’t launch until July 14 at the earliest. Aside from delaying new Centrino 2 notebooks generally (duh), it also significantly quashes the chances of new MacBooks at WWDC—particularly since one of the issues is with the integrated graphics chipset, which is causing serious failures in OEM notebooks.
So far, Intel has been lackadaisical in supporting solid state drives, just toying with the market a bit. But according to DigiTimes, Intel will soon be introducing new SSD drives with the Centrino 2 platform as a standard—2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SATA drives with 80GB of storage. In 2009, Intel plans on expanding capacities all the way up to 250GB. That’s still a hefty amount of space for standard laptop drives. No word on pricing at the moment, but we’re guessing they’ll be the most expensive “Centrinos” ever. To see Intel’s pitch on SSD, hit the jump.
Four of Intel’s mobile chipsets—including its most recent and well-known, Santa Rosa—have been Centrino as far as your mum is concerned. To help us keep things a little straighter and make it obvious they’re actually updating stuff, Intel’s upcoming Penryn-oriented mobile chipset, Montevina, which’ll be pushing Santa Rosa aside, will be branded Centrino 2. Thanks, Intel, for bringing just a little bit of logic to chip branding. Core 2 Duo is still a mouthful, though. [Digitimes]
