Intel's Next Centrino... Napa, Unveiled In Israel

HWzone has written an article on Intel's upcoming "Napa" based Centrino platform. Intel Israel is one of Intel's most important development centres, and in fact, the company owes most of its success in mobile computing to the development centres in Haifa and Yakum. As you well know, one of Intel's biggest achievements in the past few years has been the Centrino platform for mobile computers. The new generation of the Centrino, the Sonoma, has been announced several weeks ago but this week Intel Israel has displayed two working systems based on the next generation Centrino platform codenamed "Napa", which is due to replace the Sonoma in 2006. This is a first public display in Israel (and second in the world) of a working system based on the next Centrino generation, which is still under development. However, unlike the first announcement of the Napa during IDF 2004, this time we bring you photos of the actual platform as well as a demonstration of its dual-core operation. The 3rd generation Centrino platform consists of the following components: 1. Yonah - a dual-core processor manufactured in 65 nanometers. 2. Calistoga - The chipset on which the platform is based, includes an improved graphic accelerator and more efficient power management, which is supposed to extend the battery life over 5 hours. 3. Golan - a network unit that is an improved version of the current Pro/Wireless chip. Will feature better WiFi performance and will probably support the cellular 3G standard. Intel has not revealed any further information about the Napa, but during the entire event both platforms were playing a movie and running a graphic benchmark simultaneously, in order to display the ability of the dual-core processor, as you can see in the following photo: The temperatures of the CPU were not reported, but after physically touching the the heatsinks on the CPU and the north-bridge, we can definitely say the heat emission isnt high at all. In fact, we'll even risk and say that the temperatures are on the same level or even lower of the current Pentium-M processors. Although you cannot see it in the photo, the Yonah processor supports the regular mobile socket, and not the new LGA775, to which Intel is migrating its current Pentium 4 processors. Since this is an early demonstration system, and there is plenty of time before the final announcement in 2006, we still don't know if the LGA775 will become a part of Napa.