Centrino 2 launched

And a properly overclockable mobile processor announced.

Atomic was at the launch of Centrino 2 yesterday and got some tasty info for you all.

A quick backgrounder: Centrino is a brand label applied to a certain set of components. Centrino 2 is a Penryn-based Core 2 Duo paired with a new Mobile 45 chipset and a 802.11n network card. There are plans to update Centrino 2 to include a WiMAX card late this year or – as is more likely – early in 2009. The CPUs run on a 1066MHz FSB and range from 2.26 to 3.06 GHz, and the chipset supports DDR3 RAM.

The more interesting things are that Centrino 2 now has SSE 4.1 support (35 new SIMD instructions that are starting to come in handy for video encoding and other apps as more programmers update their code) and a video decoder in the integrated graphics core. The integrated video can supply almost every video output known to man (including Displayport, HDMI, DVI and VGA) as well as full HDCP.

In a nice battery saving touch, there’s an option to switch between the integrated graphics card and a more powerful ATI/NVIDIA one if it’s been installed in the laptop. It’s all part of an effort to keep power consumption low, and Intel expects Centrino 2 laptops with 6-cell batteries to be able to playback a Blu-ray film from start to finish on battery power alone and still have some charge left over. Peter Jackson may have something to say about that.

The whole thing runs more efficiently than previous versions, and can drop itself into a C6 power state to save battery life. The average power usage has dropped from 45 watts to 27.

There’s also a Centrino 2 line with VPro remote management. VPro is actually very cool, because it allows total remote administration of the laptop through the networking hardware at a lower level than remote access. Great for businesses and techno control freaks.

Interestingly, an overclockable mobile chip has also been released. It’s a 3.06 GHz Core2 Duo, and it wasn’t covered in much depth at the event, and we didn’t get many helpful answers afterwards during our conversations with the Intel gang. We’ll have more info for you once Intel’s engineers get back to us. Given that Intel’s own research suggest that up to 68 per cent of mobile users game on their laptops (though who knows if that’s Crysis or just Puzzle Quest), we’re quite keen to see more extreme hardware trickle down into the platform.