I attended the unveiling of the Intel Centrino 2 chip in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Above is Mooly Eden, corporate vp, Intel Mobile Platforms Group. (Photo taken with a Nokia N78.)
Fellow Intel Insiders Sarah Austin and Tom Foremski were also in the house. I could only stay for an hour because had to head down to Mountain View to speak at the Future of Media Summit, but here are some notes I took from Eden’s presentation:
Market share, notebooks vs. desktop PCs:
19% notebook, 81% destktops in 2000
25% notebook, 75% desktops in 2003
48% notebook, 52% desktops so far in 2008
Sales of notebooks will surpass desktop PCs later this year or in 2009.
Eden added that notebooks account for 60-65% of sales in Europe already, and that notebook penetration is expected to grow to 59% in 2011 in the United States (I think he meant market share vs. desktops).
One disappointment for me: I didn’t spot a Mac among any of the dozens of PC laptops in the displays, even though "Intel Macs" are now powering Apple’s laptop lineup. (This was more of a nerdy PC crowd than a crowd of Mac creatives. No surprise there.)
Some other interesting factoids:
Digital cameras sold:
11 million units in 2000
50 million in 2003
131 million in 2008
Videos viewed over broadband connections:
fewer than 1 billion videos viewed in 2000
fewer than 3 billion viewed in 2003
55 billion videos viewed this year
Wifi notebooks:
less than 1% of PC notebooks were wifi-ready in 2000
16% were wifi-ready in 2003
95% of PC notebooks sold today come wi-fi enabled.
Wireless connection speeds:
PC notebooks topped out at a connection speed of 56 kilobits per second in 2000
That increased to 11 megabits per second in 2003
With the Centrino 2, notebook speeds max out at 450 Mbps
Indeed, at one of the demos, an Intel rep showed me how a 10-gigabyte fle transferred over a traditional wireless network in 90 minutes, while the same transfer took place in 15 minutes with the Centrino 2 chipset.
Creating the future
Eden recalled that Intel began work on the Centrino chip in 1999. "With our OEM partners, we actually created the future," he told the crowd of perhaps 120 spectators. "Ten years ago people laughed when we told them you’ll be using the wireless ecosystem in airports and hotels. They didn’t know what they would want."
He also called out the importance of the social networking phenomenon and of user-created content. "Social networking is a revolution," he said. "We’re in the middle of a social revolution, we’re just not admitting it." He pointed to the recent earthquake in China, where people with cell phones released the first images of the devastation, as evidence of the power of citizen media.
Finally, he pointed to the growing ubiquity of high-definition devices. HDTV
shipments worldwide will grow from 38 million units today to 184 in 2013, becoming even more popular than game consoles. "You have a notebook, you’ll have high definition on it," he said.
He showed a brief demo of Assassin’s Creed, a shooter/adventure game set in Damascus that showed off some pretty wicked-looking high-end graphics. "This thing is scary!" Games will pack 70% more performance, and the Centrino 2 will play full-length Blu-Ray videos with a single battery charge.
Related:
Tom Foremski’s coverage at Silicon Valley Watcher
CNET blogs: Intel Centrino 2 chips coming in two waves
eWeek: Intel Releases Centrino 2 Mobile Platform.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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