Intel Replacing Calpella Platform With Huron River

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Intel loves selling “platforms” to their notebook manufacturing partners, that is, chipset, processor and wireless adapter – all made by Intel, that will all work together. Intel’s Calpella platform, which consists of notebook motherboard and mobile processors, is going to be replaced next year by the “Huron River” platform.

Intel only released their “Calpella” platform last October (Q3 2009), which itself was already pushed back. Everybody knows that Intel loves selling these new platforms to notebook manufacturers, and with the economic recession, notebook manufacturers were having trouble selling their stock of the previous generation “Montevina”.

So at the behest of their partners, Intel pushed back the release of Calpella from Q2 2009 to Q3 2009. Now, just months after it’s release, Intel has announced the successor, giving their partners plenty of time to clear the retail channel.

So, what does “Huron River” have in store for the end-user who will buy these notebooks using Huron River notebooks? At this point, Intel has only release information on the new processors that will be included in the Huron River family. They’ll be dubbed “Sandy Bridge”, and we’ve previously covered them here.

The main selling point that Intel is pushing on Sandy Bridge is that the integrated graphics power for the Sandy Bridge processor will be double (as in x2) that of current-gen Intel processors. Integrated graphics are notoriously lousy – graphics wise (although they are good on power consumption, and keep cost down).

You can expect information on the Huron River platform of mobile chipsets, processors and wireless adapters to start coming out between now and their release to manufacturers on Q1 2011.