Intel's Calpella to Be Launched in Q3 2009

Although people are just getting used to Intel's latest mobile platform, the Centrino 2, the Santa Clara-based chip manufacturer is already planning ahead. The company is reported to be working on the development of their next-generation mobile platform, which follows the current one codenamed Montevina.

Details about the upcoming platform, codenamed Calpella, have surfaced since early April, this year, even before users had a chance to witness the true power of the company's current Centrino 2 platform. Back then, Intel's Dadi Perlmutter didn't offer too much information about Calpella, but it did point out that it was going to be built on the same platform as the current Centrino 2. According to him, the new one will come with a significant improvement in visual graphics and will provide a revolutionary power management technology along with more management and security features for businesses. "It's going to make mobile computing more personal and more desirable," he said.

Today, Digitimes reported that Intel's next-generation notebook platform is expected to launch sometime in the third quarter of 2009, one year after the launch of the current Centrino 2 technology. The next-generation mobile platform is going to provide support for Intel's upcoming Nehalem processors and will abandon the current Northbridge and Southbridge arrangement in order to transfer many Northbridge components to the CPU package.

According to the Digitimes sources, there's going to be a single Ibex Peak-M chipset that will coordinate other features on the motherboard. This chipset will support Intel's next-generation notebook processors (Clarksfield and Auburndale) and will include an on-die DDR3 memory controller, while the Auburndale is going to provide a graphics core built in the CPU package.

In other news, Intel is expected to put an end to its Atom N270 shipments at the end of the second-quarter of 2009. Unfortunately, Intel hasn't released any information regarding the future of its next-generation Atom processor.