Intel prepares new mobile platform, Centrino

Everything seems to indicate that Intel will be pushing a new mobile platform later this year that will succeed the very popular and successful Centrino. A number of online publications are betting on the "Centrino 2" name for the upcoming mobile platform that will likely boost small CPUs ranging from 1.2GHz to 2.4GHz manufactured using a 45nm process, plus a performance range that will scale up to 2.80 GHz. New chipsets are also incoming with an updated graphics core said to double the performance from the current X3100 GPU. Among networking choices, it is expected that WiMax will make a big debut in flagship laptop models. This latter technology has received astounding support from manufacturers, but adoption has been extremely slow in the consumer market.

Intel shows off 80-core processor

Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it to boost your Doom score just yet.

Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner demonstrated the processor in San Francisco last week for a group of reporters, and the company will present a paper on the project during the International Solid State Circuits Conference in the city this week.

The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.