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Intel said in June 2009 that it was going to reposition its hugely successful Centrino brand from laptops to its wireless add-in cards. It now seems that next year this will actually happen.

In June, the company pledged to "clear away the confusion of evaluating and comparing different processor brands" by stating that this "mind-boggling array of derivatives" will "go away... over time".

Core 2, Core 4 and their Solo and Duo suffixes will disappear, it said, replace simply by Core. Pentium and Celeron will continue too, it said.

Centrino, the brand that redefined what a notebook computer was all about, primarily by making a point of mandating Wi-Fi support, will be relegated to Intel's Wi-Fi and WiMax products.

According to a DigiTimes report, an Intel representative said this week the Centrino brand will be absent from notebook platforms launched in 2010.

Like as not, that means the launch of Intel's 'Arrandale' processor, its 32nm/45nm CPU with an in-package graphics core. Arrandale is due to debut in Q1 2010 as the ultra-low voltage 1.06GHz Core i5-520UM, the 1.06GHz Core i7-620UM and the 1.2GHz Core i7-640U. They'll have 4MB of L3 cache and support 800MHz DDR 3 memory. HyperThreading will double their logical core count to four.

Further Arrandales will target the low-voltage segment, and there'll be standard voltage parts too to take the family to seven chips.

No longer making a big deal out of wireless connectivity is no surprise, since all notebooks now included the technology. Instead, Intel will promote the processor's capabilities, in particular the on-chip graphics and the power savings it says this will bring. ®

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