Centrino Duo is Intel’s new chipset for its consumer line of computers. It includes a faster Front Side Bus (FSB), a new graphics core and a new wireless chip.

Centrino Duo’s new FSB will go from 667Mhz to 800Mhz. For those of you who don’t understand the FSB’s purpose, the FSB is the physical bi-directional set of wires that carry all electronic signal information between the CPU, RAM, video cards, expansion slots, hard disks and BIOS memory.


Centrino Duo’s will support the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN component that adds draft 802.11n support.

The way to tell if your laptop has the new Centrino Duo platform is to look at the processor number. If the CPU number is T7300, T7500 or T7700 then it contains the new Centrino Duo chipset.

On the corporate-side the Centrino Duo is called the Centrino Pro. It is somewhat difficult to tell the difference between the two platforms but the sure way to know is to look at the networking hardware. If the laptop has the Gigabit controller then it is Centrino Pro. The AMT drivers point to Centrino Pro also. Intel’s Active Management Technology 2.5. AMT, which has not seen much use to date, increases the robustness and management of a system by storing certain parts of a systems configuration in flash memory, which can then later be retrieved in the event the system should fail. It has other functionality too, such as automated quarantining of compromised machines.

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