While no mention of "Centrino" has been made in Apple's announcements in its movement toward the Intel line of chips, the following link does give some insight into Pentium M vs Celeron M (as well as background on Intel's "Centrino" branding for laptop configurations) and talks about some considerations of the two for laptops.
...from: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1583&tag=nl.e539
Intel chimes in on ZDNet slam of Centrino brand -Posted by David Berlind @ 3:02 pm, July 8, 2005
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[Intel spokesperson Barbara] Grimes wrote: Our research has consistently told us that mobile PC users care most about four things: 1) performance, 2) battery life, 3) thinner & lighter form factors, and 4) built-in wireless capability. We conceived of Intel Centrino mobile technology to deliver on those four requirements. The idea of the [Centrino] brand is to give customers a simple, straightforward way to identify laptops that deliver the four things they care about most in buying a mobile PC.
My understanding of your objection is that you feel that the wireless component does not contribute to Centrino's great battery life, so it shouldn't be part of the brand. I see a couple flaws in this thinking. First, the wireless component DOES contribute to the platform battery life (certainly not as significantly as the processor or chipset, but it does nonetheless).
But just how much does it contribute? In a separate e-mail, Grimes wrote:
In an average laptop configuration, the processor and chipset together make up more than 30% of the platform's power consumption, and the wireless LAN makes up 1%.
[...] Another interesting revelation that I think challenges Centrino's value proposition is the existence of Intel's Mobile Celeron processor — the Celeron M. In my ongoing debate with Grimes, I've routinely been reminded that buyers of Centrino-branded notebooks have greater assurance than buyers of non-Centrino notebooks that their systems will successfully get a connection in a Centrino- branded Wi-Fi hotspot. (In other words, pairing a Centrino notebook with a Centrino hotspot promises a better shot at a connection then does compliance with good old fashioned wired and wireless networking standards.)
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Grimes reminded me: The [Centrino] brand is designed to enable consumers or buyers to easily identify systems that deliver the four capabilities or features that they care about most in a laptop: great performance, great battery life, thinner and lighter designs, and built-in wireless capability. After reminding me that the brand stands for all four attributes in combination, she said the Celeron M systems don't qualify because they don't do as well on battery life and performance as the Pentium M systems do. And Pentium M systems with non-Intel radios don't qualify because they're not as wirelessly capable. What's the bottom line? I agree with aforementioned message as long as there's no official implication that you can't have those four things without a Centrino system. You can. System performance and battery life, by the way, are often dependent on other things that the Centrino "requirement" says nothing about (amount of RAM and size of battery for starters). If only HP would give me some idea of how its new Turion-based notebook fares in performance and battery life against the company's most comparably equipped Intel notebook, we might learn that they're equally capable of all four attributes plus one more: the 64-bit capabilities of the Turion's AMD64 architecture. If only it wasn't for that stupid code of silence. So far, Intel hasn't shipped any mobile processors with the 64-bit capability (beyond its servers, Intel has however finally shipped an AMD64-compliant desktop Celeron).
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