Intel to 'spend $300m' to push Centrino Pro

Windows Vista tie-in part of the plan?

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in PCs & Chips, 20th October 2006 07:02 GMT

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Intel will spend a whopping $300m to promote its upcoming Centrino Pro enterprise-oriented notebook platform, it has been claimed by sources from Taiwan's laptop manufacturer community. Intel will piggyback the launch on Windows Vista, they added.

So DigiTimes reports. As we noted yesterday Centrino Pro is believed to mark the incorporation of Intel's business-centric vPro security and management technologies into its upcoming 'Santa Rosa' Centrino Duo platform.

Expect to see Active Management Technology 2.5 and Virtualisation Technology stressed in its promotional material, along with the mobile Core 2 Duo processor's support for 64-bit computing.

Vista incorporates support for Flash caches designed to improve application launch times and speed recovery from sleep. Intel's product here is codenamed 'Robson', and while this add-in card is an optional extra for the regular Centrino Duo platform, it may be mandatory for Centrino Pro.

Certainly, there have been some reports on the web that Vista requires Robson and Robson-like Flash caches. That's unlikely to be the case given that many Santa Rosa laptops will ship with Vista but possibly no Robson add-in. More likely, the rumours simply hint at the Robson's need for Vista and possibly Robson's inclusion in Centrino Pro. ®

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