Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend the unveiling of Intel’s Centrino 2 mobile platform in San Francisco. It was quite the event - showcasing many of the exciting applications that Intel’s latest technology has to offer for both business and consumer users alike.
Since its original release 5 years ago, Centrino has come a long way. Centrino 2 offers unprecedented advances in notebook technology and much of the event focused on the improvements in performance, power consumption and mobility. These improvements promise a great user experience when running resource intensive applications such as gaming and entertainment and with WiMAX trials beginning later this year, streaming high-definition video to notebooks and staying connected to business applications no matter where you are located is just around the corner.
As a result of these advancements, and with continual decreases in the cost of notebooks, market share for notebooks has been continually increasing, displacing more traditional desktop systems. It is predicted that by many including Mooly Eden of Intel, that by the end of 2008, 50% of end user systems purchased will be notebooks.
In addition the performance and mobility improvements, Intel is providing an update to the manageability capabilities offered by vPro. In an earlier blog article I wrote about the benefits of Intel® vPro™ but at the time, the management capabilities provided by the chipset did not differ significantly between the desktop and notebook form factors. With the release of Centrino 2, Intel provides an update to vPro that address some of the fundamental aspects of mobile computing. Specifically, the ability to access the management interface of the device while it is in one of those “in between” power states such as standby or hibernate is available. Also, the ability to securely access and provide out-of-band management to the device regardless of its location, even outside of the corporate network is being made possible with Centrino 2.
Of course, without a management platform such as N-central, the manageability features of Centrino 2 would be of little benefit. Keeping pace with Intel’s innovation, N-able is getting ready to release its next version of N-central which includes some new features specific to managing notebooks with (and without) vPro technology. With reduced power consumption of the Centrino 2 platform combined with N-central’s ability to manage power state and schedule routine maintenance in off hours, the reduction in power requirements make the total cost of ownership of a Centrino 2 notebook a very attractive offering for small business.
At the event in San Francisco, I was fortunate enough to be able to demonstrate interoperability provided in our upcoming release with some of the early versions of Centrino 2 notebooks provided by OEM vendors such as Lenovo and HP. The demo was very well received by everyone and further confirmed my views that the future is mobile.