Intel has announced that its forthcoming Banias mobile processor will ship under the brand name Centrino. The first chips, optimised for laptop systems, are due to appear in the first half of this year, and possibly as early as this quarter. Systems built on Centrino technology are expected to follow soon after, and should offer firms high-performance laptops with longer battery life than current models.

Centrino will feature a large amount of on-chip power-aware cache for high performance at low power consumption, and Wireless LAN (WLAN) capability will come as standard, Intel sources said.

"The Centrino brand signifies a new generation of mobile PCs that will change where and how people compute," said Pam Pollace, vice president of Intel's Corporate Marketing Group.

The Centrino, which will eventually replace today's Mobile Pentium 4 chips, will be introduced at speeds of 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz, but is expected to outperform current Pentium 4 parts running at 2GHz. It will have a large 1MB on-chip cache memory, parts of which can be turned on and off under power management control to conserve power, according to Intel.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) capability will be implemented in the Calexico mobile chipset on early Centrino systems, with a dual 802.11a/802.11b solution due later in the year. Eventually, the WLAN functions may be integrated into the processor itself.

While there are already processors targeted specifically at laptops, many are simply desktop chip designs with enhancements to cut back on power consumption. Despite this, average laptop battery life has not advanced much beyond a couple of hours. Centrino, however, has been designed from scratch to be a low-power PC-compatible chip, according to Intel. The design incorporates concepts from both the Pentium III and Pentium 4, sources said.

Centrino chips will have optimised speculation and branch prediction logic, as well as clock gating, a common power reduction technique. Laptops using Centrino technology are eventually expected to boast an eight-hour battery life, said Intel.

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