B52 bomber refurbishment benefits from Intel Centrino

INTEL'S vice president of its notebook group told attendees at a conference today that the United States Air Force (USAF) was set to save $2.5 million by moving from a paper system to a Centrino tablet set of devices.

Intel's Mr Anand Chandrasekher said that B52 bombers needed to be re-furbed on a regular basis and that the USAF had decided to use Centrino-based tablet PCs using wireless LANs, in what he dubbed a pilot scheme, to speed up the maintenance on the aeroplanes.

"Mobility is certainly taking off", he told a Soundview Semi audience this afternoon. "You can measure that by overall notebook form factor or how Centrino is doing".

Sales of notebooks in US shops exceeded sales of desktops, as Gartner said a few weeks ago. But, Mr Anand said, that's in money terms, not yet in units.

The trend, he said, is happening across the board, in the US, in Europe and elsewhere.

"Centrino captures the imagination of the user and we focused not just on performance but vectors like form factor, connectivity and battery life," said Anand.

Intel has gone for Centrino technology itself, big time, said Anand. "Sixty plus percent of our 70,000+ staff at Intel have notebooks". That brought productivity gains and a clear return on investment (ROI) for his company, he claimed. µ

L'INQ
B52 Stratofortress. Cost $30 million