With all the information that was served at IDF, something went without mention. Today there is a Mobile Pentium 4, which is an energy-optimized version of the P4 for performance notebooks. Depending on the application, this chip is positioned as being either cheaper than a full-blown Centrino platform, or simply faster than a Pentium M thanks to its bone-crushing clock speed advantage and Hyper Threading.

However, Intel intends to ramp down the Pentium 4M as quickly as possible, in favor of the Pentium M and the Centrino platform - and there definitely won't be a Mobile Pentium D. This not only makes sense from a mobility point of view, but also in expectation of AMD's upcoming Turion 64 mobile processor launch. This part will come in with thermal numbers that are expected to come close to the Pentium M, and possibly supporting some extensions that only the P4 Prescott and Xeon currently have.

955X Chipset With Dual Graphics Capability

There was one feature that Intel did not really comment on. As you can see in the picture we took from the presentation, the 955X chipset is expected to be dual-graphics capable. In contrast to NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset logic, Intel will make use of a third party bridge to allow two physical x16 PCI Express slots. Since Intel has a cross license with NVIDIA, we expect the solution to be SLI compatible.

The other chipset features are not particularly surprising. The 955X or Glenwood chipset will support up to 8 GB of Dual DDR2-667 memory, more x1 PCI Express slots, High Definition Audio sound system with ADAT interface, and MatrixRAID with software RAID 5 support. The latter is, by the way, another nice application for powerful processors; let's say for dual-core models. A dual core processor will certainly be able to cope with the XOR calculations required to run a RAID 5.