Forbes.com: Intel Looks Ahead On Wireless

At its analysts' meeting in New York, Intel offered a peek forward at what's next for Centrino. Its next Centrino-branded platform is currently codenamed "Dothan," and it will appear in the second half of the year, likely in time for the holiday gift rush.

Dothan will consist of a faster Pentium M processor and dual-band wireless networking capability. The Pentium chip will be produced on Intel's new 90-nanometer technology, which means that the transistors and other elements on the chip will be smaller than those on the current generation of Intel chips, which are made on 130-nanometer technology. The shrink will save room on the chip itself, allowing Intel to put 2 megabytes of Level 2 memory cache on the chip, which should speed up performance for certain tasks considerably. Dothan will combine 802.11b and 802.11g by the end of this year, which shouldn't be terribly hard because, by definition, 802.11g is backward-compatible with 802.11b.


The shrink will also allow the chip to consume less power, and therefore run cooler than current chips and preserve battery life.