Intel sure created a great platform and brand recognition for itself with the Centrino in the notebook market. Unlike all other CPUs present in notebooks today, the Pentium-M CPU that’s a part of the Centrino platform was designed from ground-up to be used in notebooks and offers very good performance with exceptional battery life due to its low power usage.

Very recently, Intel introduced their “Sonoma” upgrade to the Centrino platform which included a new chipset, increased FSB speeds and new technologies like PCI-Express and DDR2. Lets briefly talk about each off these features first:

533 MHz Front Side Bus: Up to 33% increase in Front Side Bus bandwidth over the previous generation 400Mhz

Support for Intel® Mobile Voltage Positioning (Intel® MVP IV): Dynamically lowers voltage based on processor activity to lower thermal design power enabling smaller notebooks.

Support for Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® technology w/ multiple voltage & frequency operating points: Allows matching of performance to application demand.

Support for dual channel DDR2 400/533 MHz memory technology: Up to 60% improvement in peak memory bandwidth and average power savings over DDR memory.

Optional Execute Disable Bit Support: When combined with a supporting OS, helps block certain viruses that try to use memory buffer overflow to attack a client PC.

Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900: Delivers a 2 times improvement in graphics performance over the previous generation chipset, the Intel® 855GME. Also supports Microsoft DirectX 9 solution for high definition media playback and 3D games.

PCI Express Bus Architecture: Enables the next generation of discrete graphics and I/O. Delivers up to a 4 times increase in discrete graphics bandwidth and 2 times the I/O bandwidth. Also supports the latest industry peripherals like ExpressCard. Low pin count offers maximum bandwidth per pin.

Dual independent display: View two independent video sources when an external monitor or panel is connected to the notebook.

Intel® Stable Image Technology: Supports a unified graphics driver: Enables hardware changes without impact to IT software image stability.

Serial ATA: Provides up to 150MB/Sec transfer rate for disk traffic.

Direct Media Interface (DMI):  With up to 2 GB/sec concurrent bandwidth, DMI provides up to 4 times faster I/O bandwidth compared to previous Intel proprietary Hub link I/O interface.

Integrated high speed USB 2.0: Support for 8 USB 2.0 peripherals for maximum 40x faster data transfer and backward compatible to support USB 1.1 devices.

Intel® High Definition Audio: New audio specification enables increased bandwidth for high quality audio and support for Dolby* Technologies. Also enables power savings during audio activity.

Integrated TV out: Provides board space and cost savings by eliminating the need for additional discrete chips.