Wireless chip makers gnash teeth at Centrino

THIRD PARTY chip makers are hoping that AMD will pull some irons out of the fire because Intel's "platform" Centrino excludes them from design wins.

The Centrino bundle includes a CPU, Intel's own chipset and its wireless LAN modules, not leaving any room for companies such as Broadcom to get sell its products in the numbers it would like.

At the same time, chipset manufacturers such as Via, SIS, Nvidia and ATI want some of the notebook chipset action. Intel sells a large number of its 855GME and similar chipsets with integrated graphics, and that hurts sales of integrated graphic chipsets and stand alone graphic cards too.

AMD's Turion, on the other hand, is open marchitecture and will let manufacturers use their own chipsets, Wireless LAN modules and graphics and other companies will sell some more chips, which has to be good for them.

So Intel benefits very much from its Centrino plan, but you cannot change many things in the design as the marketing is a closed loop where it wins. And so do OEMs that buy into the Centrino branding, because of the cash and marketing benefits it brings them. µ