I'm looking into buying a new laptop at the moment and it seems I'm in luck with Intel just now releasing it's Banias notebook CPU.

Seems the little bugger is some sort of beefed up P3, but in most areas it kicks P4 booty, or seems at least very capable of keeping up with it's big brother.

One thing puzzles me however. Anandtech has recently put up a review of 3 different Centrino notebooks, and they also show the insides of those laptops.

I couldn't help but notice that all of those notebooks seem to have an empty socket on their motherboards (I've only given one example, but they've all got it). What's this socket for? Is it for another Banias CPU to work in a dual-CPU configuration or is this socket meant for something else (and if so, what exactly?)
I haven't found any info on this yet.

Does anybody know this?

The blue socket in that link is the currently empty CPU socket. The chip to the left is the Centrino chipset.

I haven't seen anything to indicate Centrino is dual CPU capable.

I guess you're right. I thought one of those chips on the back of that motherboard was the chipset, but I forgot that chipsets have started to look a lot like CPU's themselves lately.

OK, with that problem out of the way , what do you all think of this new technology : great, or would it be better to stick with a P4 notebook? (I expect that P4 notebooks will probably get phased out in the next couple of months)

From what I have seen, it looks like a good mobile platform. Intel has finally gotten the hint that there is a demand for low power setups that don't skimp on features. Pentium-M processors are poised to replace all but the high end laptops that use desktop P4 chips. Centrino is just a marketing name meaning the laptop is anti competition, err, I mean a laptop with an Intel chip, chipset and wireless board.

im almost possitive its not a dual proceeor, at elast yet anyways. I make Intel training videos for them, and the video we made for the Centrino chip said nothing about dual processor.