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Red Bull may well become the official drink at Intel next year as the
chipmaking colossus dives head-first into the biggest set of launches
in its four decade history. Over the next 12 months Intel will renew
almost its entire line of processors with much of the action will
focus on Intel’s made-for-mobile chips.

Centrino 2-and-a-bit

Notebooks
will kick up their heels in the middle of the year with a revision of
the Centrino 2 platform aka ‘Montevina’ to the chip-heads.

“In
the Montevina refresh we’re going to deliver faster microprocessors
better graphics and a better video experience especially on high
definition” pledges Mooly Eden Intel vice president and general
manager of the company’s Mobile Platforms Group and considered the
father of the Centrino platform and its processor progeny.

New to the Montevina mix will be the ‘Cliffside‘
Wi-Fi personal area network technology which can simultaneously connect
Centrino 2 notebooks to up to eight nearby wireless devices using
hassle-free Bluetooth-style paring. Cliffside which is due to get a
catchier marketing name when Intel officially unveils the technology
during the annual Consumer Electronics Show in early January 2009 will
be baked into a revision of the Intel’s Wi-Fi Link 5×00 ‘Shirley Peak’
wireless cards.

Cliffside will allow Centrino notebooks to sit at the centre of a personal area network built around Wi-Fi devices but with the easy pairing of Blueooth

The
mid-year refresh is also expected to spur the release of thin and light
notebooks – or as Eden more honestly calls the “thin and sexy”.

“I
believe you’ll see a lot of  thin and sexy systems with the Montevina
refresh not because it cannot be done today but because people are
trying to refresh for specific cycles” Eden explains. “You have the
back to school cycle you’ve got the holiday cycle and normally the
OEMs are trying to come up with the new SKUs in line with selling
seasons. So I believe we’ll see a lot of thin and sexy designs for back
to school”. (Note that the US back-to-school sales season typically
runs from mid-August to early September).

Calpella: sixth-generation Centrino

By
year’s end we’ll see the first wave of mobile processors based on the
all-new Nehalem microarchitecture. These will carry a derivative brand
similar to the Core i7 moniker which Intel is reserving for its performance desktop chips.

Packing
what’s expected to be a substantial boost in both performance and
battery life they’ll provide be the foundation a full revision to the
Centrino platform codenamed Calpella (after a district on the north
coast of California). We’re not sure if Intel’s notebook platform will
retain the Centrino 2 moniker or switch to the suitably ‘lead ahead’
Centrino 3 brand but Calpella could be more accurately described as
Centrino 6.0.

Showcasing the first working Calpella system a
year ahead of its expected production debut Eden describes the
Montevina refresh as an evolutionary step “before you come to the new
(Calpella) platform which is the revolution”.

Mooly Eden Intel mobility guru and father of the Centrino demonstrates the first working Calpella-based laptop

Most
of the focus will remain on increasing the power efficiency of Calpella
notebooks. “Today we’ve got 35 watt CPUs and 25 watt CPUs but when we
go to Calpella everything is 25 watts” Eden says. “So we are taking the
overall power one notch down so we can have thinner notebooks.”

The
processors will also use what Intel terms an ‘integrated power gate’ to
fully disable subsystems which are not being used instead of leaving

them in a low voltage sleep state.

“Each core in Nehalem has a
transistor with which we can switch on and off the whole core” Eden
explains. “There’s absolutely zero power leakage because it doesn’t get
any voltage. This is also used in the memory system cache and I/O to
dynamically power them down when not in use. We wanted to do this (for
some time) but we simply didn’t have the technology to do it and do it
automatically ‘on the fly’ until now.”

In keeping with the
Nehalem design Calpella-grade systems will move from being a
three-chip package to a two-chip package with the memory controller and
graphics integrated into the processor.

“This lets you share the
cache of the microprocessor and at the same time save a lot of power
because there’s a lot of traffic flowing between the IO buffers” Eden
says.

“One of the things we took advantage of with the 45nm
process technology is we could design a huge cache so if the
microprocessor wants data that’s in the cache it doesn’t need to go
outside. The cache can hold 90-something percent of the data you want.
But in the few occasions that you don’t have it we used to go to the
northbridge (memory controller) and then go to the memory. And the
situation today is that the microprocessor is so much faster that the
time that you take going to the memory if the cache doesn’t have what
you need is crucial. Now we’re building the memory controller inside
so even if you need to get the data from external source it will be
much faster.”

Notebook chips built on the Nehalem architecture will share a beefy superslab of cache plus an integrated memory controller and a new QuickPath Interconnect to replace the front side bus

“The
other breakthrough is that we are going to put the graphics on the same
chip so it can also enjoy the cache. More importantly there’s a huge
amount of traffic between the graphics chip and the microprocessor and
a huge amount of power drawn. If I cut all the IOs and everything
because I put it on the same chip I can save a lot of power.”

Also to come in Calpella will be embedded DisplayPort
technology to drive laptop screens plus what Intel terms ‘adaptive
snoozing’ for the wireless chip. This allows the radio to adjust its
behaviour according to the current task in much the same way that
modern microprocessors can throttle up or down or even enter a number
of low-power sleep states during light loads. For example the wireless
transmitter can be put to sleep when all you’re doing is reading a Web
page or watching streaming video.

“You’ll very definitely see a
power advantage in Calpella” promises Eden. “I believe with Calpella
you’ll see notebooks that run for six hours maybe seven hours in some
extremes. You’ll also see more thin and sexy designs coming out”.

David Flynn attended IDF Taipei 2008 as a guest of Intel.