The Intel® PRO/Wireless 2915ABG

The Intel® PRO/Wireless 2915ABG mini PCI card

The new Sonoma Mobile Technology platform also includes a new wireless LAN adapter - the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2915ABG. The main feature of this new wireless adapter is it tri-band support for IEEE 802.11a/b/g standards. Apart from that, Intel also released the new Intel® PROSet/Wireless software version 9 which not only comes with a new look but also adds support for many new features.

Intel® PROSet/Wireless software version 9

And according to the Intel's download site here, users of the older Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection do not need to feel left out as the new version of the Intel PROSet/Wireless software also includes support for it.

Unfortunately, users of the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection like me, have no choice but to continue using the old version 7 of the software.

The Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900

As of the writing of this technical brief, we have not been able to get more information behind this new integrated graphics solution from Intel themselves. However, we have been able to see much improvements in performance compared to the Intel® Extreme Graphics 2.

This new graphics solution would, of course, not interest users who are specifically looking for discrete GPU solutions from either ATI or NVIDIA. But for casual users, this improved solution means that they will be able to enjoy better graphics performance. We'll be looking at the The Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900 again when we present the benchmarks later in this article.

PCI Express Bus Architecture

As Intel puts it in their platform brief, the PCI Express bus architecture of the Sonoma Mobile Technology platform delivers 2X I/O bandwidth for improved system, application performance & smooth multimedia performance. Technically, this new PCI Express bus architecture would be able to improve system performance only if the system is using the integrated graphics solution.

As you all would know, integrated graphics solutions share the bandwidth of the system memory. In previous platforms, the graphics chip accesses the memory via the AGP bus. Thus, with the new PCI Express bus which delivers higher data bandwidth, the graphics performance should theoretically improve too.

However, if a dedicated GPU chip is used, it usually comes with its own dedicated memory buffer. In such cases, this additional bandwidth will result in little, if any, noticeable improvements in performance.

As for support for new Express Cards that replaces the older PC Card standard, this is only useful if you can get an Express Card-based expansion card. Unfortunately, the availability of this new card is as rare as finding diamonds on the road.

Serial ATA Support

The Sonoma Mobile Technology platform also introduces the Serial ATA standard to the mobile PC. While Serial ATA enables up to 150MB/s transfer rate for disk traffic, it is the feature of being able to provide aggressive link power management functionality that is really useful for the mobile PC platform.

And since the Serial ATA standard does not require as many wires as the standard IDE interface, this also helps the mobile PC manufacturer in designing a better notebook. Unfortunately, again, the availability of Serial ATA-based mobile hard disks are quite rare, if not available at all right now.

Intel® High Definition Audio

As of the writing, we were also not able to gain any information regarding this new audio capability that promises quite a number of interesting features. Intel claims that the new Intel® High Definition Audio can support DTS, THX, and all Dolby technologies for a premium home theater experience. Multi-streaming capability enables support for separate audio channels with independent audio streams to different devices.

Thus, there may not be a need to integrate a discrete audio chip for better sound experience anymore. However, we have yet to see how this new audio capability performs. It's also very vague what Intel meant by their audio solution being able to support DTS, THX and all Dolby technologies.

It this simply by having a digital SPDIF output? Or will it support more that one stereo audio channel out for a full 5.1 surround experience right out of a Sonoma-based mobile PC? We'll be looking into this again once we get more information on it.