The Hindu Business Line : India powers Intel's Centrino

Bangalore May 18 From providing post-launch support to contributing to 50 per cent of Intel's latest offering, Indians working at its development centre here have steadily worked their way up the ladder to becoming indispensable.

"From stack to finish, 50 per cent of the effort in building the next generation Centrino mobile platform was done at the India centre. Except the CPU and wireless chips, the rest of the work - including electrical analysis and design of the reference board, battery life optimisation and performance analysis, BIOS development and support (booting), and more, were done from here," said Mr Sandeep Shah, Director - Mobility Group, Intel India.

`More' includes validation of Turbo Memory - the new feature that increases boot-up time by 20 per cent, and applications by two times. The team also created some of the software utilities and tools that help in enabling certain features of the processor.

The design of graphics and memory controller hub, custom circuits, graphics drivers for Microsoft's operating systems XP and Vista, and drivers for extended thermal manageability were also done at the centre. The centre previously contributed to `Napa' and `Napa small form factor', which were introduced in 2006. It also helped design and validate the quad-core Xeon 5300 and Intel Core 2 Extreme families.

Centrino, code-named Santa Rosa, comes in two flavours. For business users, it is married with Intel's vPro virtualisation software and called Centrino Pro. For consumers, it is called Centrino Duo. It brings new features such as the latest wireless 802.11n and security on hardware.

"This platform is making the enterprise safer. Whether asleep or entering the office network, the laptop is secure. When a virus is detected, the chip immediately wakes up the laptop and disconnects it from the network before fixing the virus," said Mr Shah.

Centrino Pro desktops for business users will be sleeker and quieter, unlike their clunky predecessors, said Mr Shah. He referred to Apple's Mac Mini as an example of what the desktop would be like. Around 20 designs are ready and many PC makers are looking forward to introducing the "new form factor designs" to the market soon, he added. So the next time you get to work on a Centrino desktop, remember - half of it was done right here!