Intel Will Highlight Silverthorne at CES

NEW YORK—Intel is planning to use the 2008 Internal CES to highlight its efforts to dominate the emerging mobile market.

At a briefing for reporters Dec. 14, the Santa Clara, Calif., company announced that the first devices to use its new "Menlow" mobile platform will be on display at CES and then hit the market by the second quarter of 2008.

Menlow, which includes a 45-nanometer processor called Silverthorne and new chip set dubbed Poulsbo, was first discussed at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September. While Intel withheld additional details about the actual processor, Silverthorne is designed as a low-power chip that will form the base of a new generation of MIDs (mobile Internet devices) and UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) that use Intel microarchitecture.

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At the 2007 IDF, CEO Paul Otellini said the mobile space—laptops, MIDs and UMPCs—would be a key part of Intel's future roadmaps and Menlow is the first of several platforms that the company is designing to take advantage of a potentially lucrative market. The platform promises to offer better performance, long-battery life and chips that will work within a small thermal envelope.

Intel pointed to recent numbers from IDC that showed notebook shipments will over take desktop shipments within the next year. This trend, according to Intel, is the beginning of a larger shift to mobility that will include mature and emerging markets and both the enterprise and consumer markets.

Click here to read more about notebooks overtaking desktops.

At the 2008 CES, Pankaj Kedia, Intel's director of mobile Internet and UMPC platforms, said the company plans on showing off at least 10 different MIDs and UMPCs from a range of vendors, including Lenovo, Asus, Quanta, Clarion and several others.

While there are no specific enterprise plans yet for Menlow, Kedia said that Intel does plan to develop products for vertical markets and for users that find themselves on the road such as real estate agents and salespeople.

"For the enterprises, we see this as more of vertical play," Kedia told eWEEK. "It's not for the office-bound worker. For the traditional enterprise, the ramp will be a little longer than the consumer market."

While there were no additional details about Silverthorne, Intel has said that the processor will use 10 times less power than current models and the entire platform can fit onto a 74-milimeter by 143-milimeter motherboard. The types of MIDs and UMPC on display will offer users a combination of Wi-Fi, WiMax and 3G wireless technology.

Intel is also planning to move ahead with its WiMax plans, despite the end of the partnership between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to build a WiMax network across the country. In 2008, Intel is predicting that 150 million people will have access to WiMax networks and that number will increase to 750 million by 2010.

In 2008, Intel will roll out its "Montevina" mobile platform that will use 45-nanometer processors and a new technology called "Eco Peak," which will integrated both WiMax and Wi-Fi technology into the silicon.

In addition to its attention to MIDs and UMPC, in January Intel will also refresh its notebook platform, formally code-named Santa Rosa and now dubbed Centrino Pro for business laptops and Centrino Duo for consumer models. The refresh will include the new 45-nanometer Penryn processors, which launched in November.

The new laptop platform is promising to offer better battery life and the chip's SSE4 instruction set should help speed up functions such as rendering high-definition video.

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