centrino just refers to the bundle intel puts with the pentium M, CENTRINO denotes a chipset, wireless, and CPU all from intel. the wireless is better than average, and uses roughly same energy as other on-board wireless b/g variants. as for the cpu it is more efficient per-clock than even the best AMD's which is a shame, because i can't hate intel as much as i used to now... they sell a board for it now, and on air people are getting 50%+ overclocks, so a viable option for a very powerful desktop chip.(no hyperthreading on any pentium M's tho, and they will never go dual core probably.)