Centrino 2 gets an outing but stays under wraps

SEAN MALONEY plugged the future of Wimax here today, brandishing a Centrino 2 system that he said would be launched on some future, unspecified 'happy day'.

Without giving much away, ex-Londoner turned blue-blooded citizen of Intella said the future was about Web 2.0, about “socialisation”.

Up until now a lack of processing power and decent battery life have not enabled mobile use of the web on a PC in a meaningful way, Maloney said. And the networks we’re all used to just don’t have the bandwidth. We still haven’t got all these things but will have soon. Once Centrino 2 is fixed and out the door and once the world is Wimaxed up, naturally.

Maloney was buoyed by the announcement this morning that the Taiwanese government is putting its money where its mouth is with an attempt to Wimax up Taipei. Intel has a memorandum of understanding with the Taiwanese government to fill the ether with data and the government here said it has spent some $200 million promoting and implementing use of the technology.

Maloney showed a video from Taiwan's minister of Economic Affairs Chii-ming Yiin, who said he thought that Wimax represents the next big growth opportunity for Taiwan's ITC industry, with local companies beavering away on Wimax kit for export.

Maloney's keynote wandered across the mobile landscape pausing briefly in the desktop arena long enough to announce the launch of the firm's Series 4 chipsets, P45, G45, and P43 and G43. He reminded us that it was on this very stage last year that the 3 Series was introduced with the support of loads of manufacturers. This year there are even more, he declared, but we missed the exact number he claimed in the scramble to bring you this pic:

Maloney Baloney: wailing at the wall of Nehalem

Maloney and one of his on-stage stooges hyped the on-board graphics capabilities of these chipsets, but since were not entirely sure what these were we'll hang on 'til we get our hands on one or two.

He was going Hi-def bananas by now and said the chipsets are great at HD. Cool! The guys streamed images from Assassin's Creed and Crysis to a P45-powered board but we suspect that was just to confuse everyone.

So after Wimax, which isn't really here yet, and Centrino 2, which isn't here yet either, we had the 4 series chipsets... which are. Here are a couple from Asustek's stand. We then moved to Atom, which had its launch do immediately after Maloney's hour was up. In fact Maloney had to speed things up a bit to finish early to get the press out the door and down the road to the Atom launch. Leaves us wondering what the Volish chap on after Maloney had to say.

Anyhow, Atom's tiddly thanks to Intel's 45nm High-K cleverness Maloney sorta said. It's tiny, tiny and allows us to do wonderful things. He did another pull-back-the-curtain trick to reveal a bunch of net-books or net-tops or net curtains or Eee-alikes or whatever you want to call these things.

These are for the Next Billion internet users of course. Though we doubt they'll ever get their hands on them. Well not for a few years at least. By then the ice caps will have melted the Middle East will be fighting over a dusty wasteland, Africa will be parched and we'll be making Merlot in Yorkshire apparently. We doubt there'll be a further billion after that, on any roadmap.

After Atom what did Maloney have left? Well Nehalem, of course, the next desktop chip to keep Intel where it likes to be: "We're hard-core committed to staying out there getting faster and faster," balonied Maloney. Nehalem will come along "in the not-too-distant future," he promised – again.

A few words on SSDs: great for ruggedness and speed, "An interesting extension to the disk drive industry".

Asustek's Atom-powered (W)Eeeebox – "neat gyroscopic interface" and the reason we need all these different processing products? To keep all our digital photos and HD videos in order: "How many gigabytes for your life?"

And the wrap: "The more we innovate and bring consumers into the industry, the better we can bridge the digital divide."

"The future is brighter than ever," beamed Maloney in conclusion. Mind you, the note on the bottom of the Centrino 2 slide read: "All dates, plans, features are preliminary and subject to change without notice." Quite. µ