Intel punches Centrino's card in platform clearout

by Stevie Smith - Jun 18 2009, 15:45

Intel Corporation, the world’s leading chipmaker, has this week revealed plans to retire and/or re-brand a selection of its existing products, which will include the stalwart Centrino technology platform.

According to the Santa Clara-based manufacturing giant, the Centrino brand will cease to be used in reference to personal home computers from 2010, with Intel shifting Centrino’s focus to Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies.

Notable casualties set to be phased out by Intel include various chips under the popular Core umbrella as it attempts to scale back a crowded product portfolio and alleviate rising consumer confusion.

“Over the last year or so, Intel has been quietly working behind the scenes taking a hard look at our brand structure and exploring ways to make it more rational and easier to understand,” explained Intel Corp. spokesman Bill Calder via an official company blog post.

“The fact of the matter is, we have a complex structure with too many platform brands, product names, and product brands, and we’ve made things confusing for consumer and IT buyers,” he added.

“Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc.)... Over time those will go away and in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors.”

In order to effectively streamline its range of microprocessors, Intel has said it will re-brand its remaining Core chips as the Core i3, the Core i5, and the Core i7, which will signify an easy to understand low, middle and high performance scale.

Chips that will remain untouched by Intel’s sweeping changes include popular desktop and notebook platforms such as Celeron and Pentium, along with the budget Atom line used in the vast majority of ultra mobile Netbook computers.

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