It is a type of Central Processing Unit, CPU for short. The CPU is the main calculating chip. The "Centrino" is a CPU specifically designed for use in laptops. In practice this mostly comes down to the following things:

Because laptops have very little room for air flow, it is very difficult to efficiently get rid of the heat produced by the CPU, this is why the Centrino CPU is specifically designed to produce as little heat as possible.

Also because laptops are supposed to last as long as possible on their accu the Centrino is designed to use as little batterypower as possible.

I suspect these optimizations for laptop use will most likely have a negative impact on the CPU's performance to some degree, but I don't know exactly how much slower it is compared to desktop pc's.

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