Intel Corp. today announced details of its Centrino Pro mobile platform, which will not only be based on the new hardware with more powerful capabilities, but will also inherit manageability of the vPro platforms that Intel has been selling for about a year now. A significant enhancement to the vPro is that Centrino Pro notebooks will be manageable wirelessly.

“Intel Centrino Pro processor technology brings the best of our offering with Intel vPro processor technology and adds it right into our highly successful Intel Centrino brand for laptops,” said Mooly Eden, vice president of Intel Mobile Products Group.

Like all Santa Rosa-based platforms, Intel’s Centrino Pro platform will also add performance improvements as well as some new features to the currently shipping Centrino Duo notebooks. The new mobile platform will feature code-named Intel Core 2 “Merom” processor with 800MHz processor system bus, new core-logic code-named Crestline with advanced built-in graphics core, Intel “Robson” technology that boosts performance of hard disk drives, code-named Kedron wireless network controller compliant with a draft-802.11n standard, which will increase bandwidth to up to 600Mb/s, and some other innovations. Instead of BIOS, the new platform will support UEFI, an interface that helps hand off control of the system for the pre-boot environment (i.e.: after the system is powered on, but before the operating system starts) to an operating system, such as Windows or Linux.

The main differentiator of the Centrino Pro platforms over consumer-oriented systems is support for Intel active management technology, which allows IT managers to manage and protect their systems over local area network. With Centrino Pro platforms system administrators will be able to manage those notebooks using wireless local area network regardless of their power state or the health of the PC.

Intel Centrino Pro platform-based notebooks will be available in the second quarter this year as part of the company’s planned introduction of the next-generation Centrino platform.