X-bit labs

Intel Discontinues Family of Intel Pentium M, Celeron Chips.

Category: Mobile

by Anton Shilov

[ 05/17/2005 | 04:30 AM ]

Intel Corp. announced intention to cease production of numerous Intel Pentium M and Intel Celeron M processors with 400MHz processor system bus. The plan includes various processors designed for older generation mobile infrastructure and indicates the company’s intention to gradually shift to higher-speed 533MHz processor system bus for its mobile platforms.

The world’s largest chipmaker will discontinue all Intel Pentium M processors with 2MB L2 cache and support for 400MHz processor system bus, including models running at 1.60GHz – 2.10GHz clock-speed. Intel will also cease to supply various Intel Celeron M processors, including LV and ULV flavours. Customers should place orders on Intel’s mobile processors to be discontinued until the 23^rd of September, 2005.

Intel Celeron M and Intel Pentium M processors are designed for various notebooks with low power consumption and are usually sold under Intel Centrino brand-name being bundled with Intel chipsets and Intel wireless LAN controllers.

Intel’s most-recent plans were to accelerate deployment of Intel’s latest version of Centrino platform that supported 533MHz processor system bus in addition to other advantages.

“In the second quarter we expect the Sonoma platform to almost double the volume and represent over half of our mobile shipments,” said Paul Otellini President and Chief Operating Officer of Intel Corp. in a recent conference call.

Intel’s latest incarnation of Centrino platform previously code-named Sonoma primarily targets the consumers, while the initial Centrino incarnation addressed the needs of business and enterprise users, who are not much interested in loads of multimedia capabilities, but are more concentrated on battery life and wireless LAN capability, still, Intel incorporated a number of technologies that further reduce power consumption of notebooks, such as Intel Display Power Saving Technology 2 (Intel DPST2), which reduces display backlight power by up to 400mW with minimal visual impact.

Intel’s President and COO Paul Otellini recently said 80 notebook makers planned to adopt the new Centrino flavour at launch and more than 150 would ship products based on the Sonoma by the end of 2005.