Intel's Centrino: is the strategy paying off?

Centrino is Intel's marketing term for a combination of three technologies for notebooks - wireless LAN, chipsets, and the Pentium M microprocessor.

But Centrino is also a catch-all term for what's possibly Intel's biggest worldwide brand marketing push since its "Inside" campaign, and there's at least two sides to this venture.

First, there's a large sum of co-operative marketing money being put into the Centrino brand to encourage its customers - the PC manufacturers - to adopt the logo and the technology for their own notebooks. The co-op marketing money isn't just for joint advertising, but there is also a push to engage third parties, including for example the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and others to engage in Intel's plan. Other elements are joint roadshows with other players, some shared R&D, and other events and projects.

The second element in this branding exercise may be more important than the first. All around the world, Intel is attempting to brand Centrino as the standard for wireless networking, and to associate its technology with what's undoubted public interest in people being able to use their notebooks wherever they are.

Before Intel started its "Intel Inside" campaign in the 1990s, it had little brand awareness. Recent figures show that now Intel is one of the most widely recognised brands on the planet. Before Intel Inside, many of the firm's press relations was concerned with the electronics titles: with the introduction of that campaign, the big team of spinners started to engage with TV, with radio, with the consumer press, and with mainstream press such as national newspapers and magazines. That push undoubtedly paid off.

Whether you're sitting in the bar of a hotel in New Delhi as we were last year, and hearing the familiar "tubular bells" Intel jingle, or at home watching TV, the chip giant is well nigh inescapable.

So if you're in the departure lounge at Kennedy in New York, you'll see huge banners with the Centrino logo. Our reader, Cristiano took this shot in a swanky Tokyo shopping area, while below we took a shot of this Centrino banner at Waterloo Station in London, which is not only London's busiest railway station, but also the starting point for Eurostar travellers heading for France, Belgium and points onwards.

Intel advert at Waterloo Station: just outside the copship

After a while, people perhaps don't even register the Centrino kitemark or the Intel logo consciously - it permeates peoples' minds at a more subtle level. If they hear about wireless LANs, wi-fi and such technology, the connection has already been made.

Centrino and Wireless LANs
In fact, the wi-fi technology that's part of the Centrino technology bundle is not the best there is. Last June, the 802.11g standard was ratified by an IEEE subcommittee - this wireless technology has a much larger range than 802.11b and is also backward compatible with 802.11b. The other standard widely heard about is 802.11a: there are certain problems that are likely to mean this one will be left by the wayside. There was opposition to 802.11a by several countries which used this wireless spectrum for other purposes. While many of these difficulties have now been solved, it's the compatibility problems that might consign 802.11a to the back shelf.

Despite this, Intel is committed to migrating the wireless technology associated with Centrino to be dual 802.11a/11b. That's likely to happen either during late this quarter or early the next. At a conference call just a few weeks back, senior Intel executives suggested 802.11g connectivity might be out by the end of the year. It could be, but no-one we've talked to is promising.

As a sign of Intel's wholehearted committment to the Centrino troika, it quietly dumped its own discrete wireless cards earlier this year. They get in the way of the overall strategy. Nevertheless, despite the incentives for PC vendors to adopt the Centrino brand and the coop money, quite a few, like Dell for example, are allowing people the choice of either going for the full monty, or adopting two out of three elements and using discrete 802.11g/b cards.

There's another problem with wireless LANs which we can't help noticing. They're not as widespread yet as either we or, we suspect Intel, would like. Here in London, they're still very thin on the ground. Not every Starbucks has gone for them. London Gatwick claims to have wi-fi networks but coverage is patchy. Only some Heathrow terminals have them.

That is likely to change, but Intel, in private conversations with the INQUIRER earlier in the year, agreed it needed to do a great deal more to educate commercial and non-commercial organisations. For example, what's to stop the Lord Mayor of London, "Red" Ken Livingstone, to cooperate with a number of vendors to take up the Paris Metro/Cisco wi-fi idea? Education - and maybe money too. So when we see Linksys-Cisco and Intel cooperating, we'd suggest there's more to the agreement than meets the eye.

Centrino Chipsets
Currently there a number of chipsets available for the Pentium M, and the number will rise towards the end of this year. They include the 855GM (MGM) and the 855PM (Odem) but when a more efficient microprocessor is released in the fourth quarter, that will use the 855GME (MGM+).

That's going to be a chipset with integrated graphics and by then Intel also hopes to have its "next generation" wi-fi kit on board too.

Intel has started to make a push into the consumer market this quarter, and although that doesn't seem yet to be reflected in chipset prices, that may well change.

The firm also hopes to migrate its Pentium M chipset into a new family of mobile "Celeron" chips which could come as soon as early next year.

Pentium M Microprocessor
The Pentium M, a kind of superset of the rather successful Pentium III-M chip, has a slight problem. Intel so successfully conditioned the world+dog into its mindset that megahertz matter, that when it first launched its Pentium M, formerly codenamed Banias, it had to tell its original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) what clock speeds the chips used. But on the other hand, because many of these frequencies were lower than its former flagship notebook, the Pentium 4M, it didn't want to shout that fact from the rooftops. That led to the rather schizoid position where megahertz mattered, but only sometimes.

To circumvent this, Intel positions the Pentium M as having better battery life and thermal characteristics, as well as bigger cache. Pentium Ms currently have 1MB of cache. After comparing our lovely Sony Pentium III-M at 1.20GHz with our handsome Panasonic with a Pentium M at 900MHz, we have to agree that certainly, case for case, megahertz don't matter for the Centrino chip. The battery life of the latter notebook is very much better than the former. Many might not care, and so "desknotes" might be the notebook of choice. But as we pointed out in another article today, if you're a hack on the move or a suit who has to read her or his email whenever possible, it very definitely does matter.

These are the frequencies Intel is telling its customers that the Pentium M will deliver up to the second half of next year.

As we've pointed out in an earlier article, the frequencies marked with an asterisk show the 90 nanometer versions of these notebook chips. They're currently codenamed "Dothan", and have a rather impressive 2MB of on die cache, making them good candidates for blades as well as notebooks. And for desktop PCs? That takes us nicely on to the last part of this article.

Politics, Politics, Politics
We understand from a source in Taiwan that when we suggested that the Pentium M chip would make a wonderful desktop processor, all hell broke loose in Santa Clara.

Why? Well, the notebook division of Intel, last time we counted, had a staff of between 600-800, while the desktop processor group, the "glory boys" headed up by Louis "I read the INQUIRER every day" Burns", has many thousands of staff more.

Each division of Intel, rather naturally, pushes its own product lines as far as it can within the organisation, playing for the hearts and minds of the people at the top with the power.

The desktop CPU people must have gone preternaturally ashen faced when they saw the INQ begin the Pentium M for Desktop Crusade. Why, this is the team that's made Intel what it is. It's the creme de la creme, the bee's bollocks, the summum bonum and the rest.

Some little upstart division's CPU, designed by a team of geeks out in Israel couldn't produce a better chip than the desktop group, could they?

Well, comparisons are odious. But looking at this from the outside, it's for sure that the small notebook group, as a team, has done well. In keynote after keynote, CEO Craig Barrett sings the praises of the Pentium M and the Centrino brand. The marketing money is there, and whether the desktop group like it or not, many on the outside, including the INQ staff here, consider the notebook technology - especially given the rate of convergence, to be the leading edge stuff these days.

Sheesh! Even the marketing analysts have started to agree. Sales of notebooks have for the first time outpaced those of desktops. Maybe it's some time for re-alignment and perhaps the traction in the desktop faction and the friction in the notebook interdiction will soon come to an end?

Small form factor PCs are hot - or rather we should say - cool things. The Pentium M and the Centrino are poised for bigger - or perhaps we should say smaller things, in the future. µ

See Also
Intel readies hyperthreading notebook push
Intel roadmaps