Intel Hoping For Wireless Boom With Centrino

The launch event was held at San Francisco's Ferry Building and featured demonstrations of the new technology's capabilities by several Intel partners. The company's aim was to highlight new features that will enable a Centrino (code-named Sonoma) laptop to function as a gaming console, MP3 player and home theater as well as a business-critical mobile device.

"Sonoma will raise mobile performance capabilities to a whole new level," says Mooly Eden, vice president of Intel's mobility group. "This puts all your entertainment devices into one sleek form factor, and with the wireless ecosystem we have now, you can be at almost any remote location and still access all the content stored on your home network."

Although the demonstrations at the event focused mostly on consumer applications, Intel intends to heavily target the enterprise with the Centrino laptops. With this release, Intel purports to have created the most secure Wi-Fi computer available, but it may be a little while longer before the enterprise truly gets this message.

"We're still at a point in the enterprise where a lot of customers still don't see the value of wireless," says Bill Rossi, vice president of the wireless networking business unit at Cisco Systems, which was on hand to showcase its wireless LAN technology.

Rossi says Cisco has built a solid business around wireless deployments in the $100,000 to $200,000 range, but only recently has graduated to much larger installations such as one in Victoria, Australia that outfitted 1,600 schools with a wireless network. "We're at an inflection point of wireless in the enterprise, and we'll soon see more developments like these," he says.

Centrino has clock-speeds through its Pentium M processor ranging from 1.5 GHz to 2.13 GHz, and it includes higher bandwidth for Wi-Fi connections. Prices will range from $270 to $705 in 1,000-unit quantities. Intel also introduced the Celeron M processor 370 at 1.5 GHz for $134 and the Celeron M ULV at 1.0 GHz for $161 in 1,000-unit quantities.

Given the robustness laptops now have, it's natural to wonder if and when notebooks will overtake desktop PCs. "We're already starting to see the transition from desktops to mobile devices," Eden says. "But when will we see the 'hockey stick' market curve? We should start seeing some evidence of this by the middle of this year."

That's when the company says roughly 150 new notebook PC designs from its OEMs will start to ship, ranging from 17-inch wide-screen models to ones starting in the $1,000 range. This is of particular interest to white-box and white-book VARs who now are likely to have many more choices about which models to represent.

"We've seen a tremendous amount of notebook growth in the channel, which is becoming a more important part of our business," says Jim Noble, director of Intel's Asia Pacific ODM enabling group. "It's a natural progression; as mobility and Centrino have caught on, we've seen the move to mobility solutions in the channel, and there now are more than 25 platform solutions available to them."

He says that as the number of white-book manufacturers increases, it should help eliminate the reluctance the channel sometimes has had about carrying their products. "A couple of years ago, there weren't many options available," he says. "But as more ODMs get into making notebooks based on Centrino, a lot of the time-to-market and quality issues VARs have had will go away."

He says this will be helped along by Intel's Common Building Blocks program, an initiative announced last fall that aims to get Intel OEMs to build their notebooks using the same basic components. "The idea is to create common, interchangeable solutions by getting all the OEMs to use the same components," Noble says. "The channel will like it because of how it lets them service and support multiple platforms, and we should start seeing products from this by late 2005 or early 2006."