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Intel Spills Beans On Santa Rosa Notebook Platform
Steve Kerrison writes "From the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing comes news of the successor to the Napa notebook platform. Santa Rosa, which will head up Intel's notebook technology line-up until 2H 2008, beefs up almost everything seen in Napa, from graphics to WiFi. 'Santa Rosa carries Robson Technology, now known as Intel Turbo Memory, the flash-based disc-caching system that speeds up loading times of frequently-used data. Santa Rosa is an obvious continuation of the Centrino series. There will also be another Santa Rosa Centrino variant — Pro — that covers the business features found on Intel's Q-series chipsets, namely vPro.' Intel's Core2 mobile processors remain a key part of the platform, as you'd expect, with 45nm 'Penryn' CPUs making their way into the Santa Rosa refresh in 2008."
I know this is OT, but does the fact that Slashdot now has an "Intel Opinion Center" mean we will be seeing more gushing reviews and meta-reviews of Intel products and less reporting of important issues like the AMD antitrust suit?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Santa Rosa?
Robson Technology?
Intel Turbo Memory?
Q-series?
vPro?
Penryn?
My brain can't take any more buzz.
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I spilled some beans on my pants once, and I never got that stain out. I really hope they can get their new platform clean.
This must be rough for Intel. Spilling beans on a computer is bad enough (have you ever TRIED getting beans out of electronics? It's a nightmare!), but spilling them on a development prototype? Somebody had to get fired for this debacle...
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Just a question, but doesn't flash-based HDs make this an obsolete technology already?
One of the current limitations (IMHO) of the current Napa based systems is the fact that system memory is limited to 3GB. (Well, I guess you can install more memory, but the memory beyond 3GB isn't used) I've been following the news on the Santa Rosa systems, and I haven't seen any updates if they are going to remove this limitation, especially considering the Core2 processors are all 64-bit...
Doh!
This all sounds pretty ho hum. What it looks like is pushing performance harder and harder. More performance almost always means more battery consumption. So, we'll get really powerful laptops whose batteries last at least a couple of hours. How about a radical idea; a computer that is just powerful enough to do spreadsheets and word processing with a battery that lasts long enough to fly from New York to LA.
I've just started saving up for a Thinkpad T series, and was hoping that something a bit better would come out by the time I could afford it. This is great news. Hopefully it'll use the Intel 965 as I believe that this works fine with Free software drivers... I don't think the Wifi will be any good though, as usual.
Free software, free thought, free society.
Maybe someone can answer this question for me: Is the flash memory for this integrated into an SMD chip on the motherboard (like the north- or south-bridge chips), or is it a plug-in module like a SIMM/DIMM?
Flash memory wears out, the current generation only being good for a few tens-of-millions of write cycles per page. Most flash-based USB memory sticks get around this by reserving about 5% slack-space and using wear-levelling internally (similarly to JFFS). Even so, they eventually run out of usable blocks and the host computer will see block checksum errors on writing.
If "Intel Turbo Memory" is on-chip and can't be disabled in the CMOS setup I can see people having to throw away motherboards that would otherwise be perfectly useful.
Intel graphics with F/OSS drivers and a core2 CPU is what I want from a notebook but EFI is tantamount to DRM. Is there anybody working on modding Intel chipsets to use open firmware instead?
How will these new chips effect the size of new notebooks? How will they effect battery life?
That would be good use for the extra pci-e x1 slots.
I can only imagine Intel is naming their products after northern CA cities. If that's the case, why the hell would they pick "Santa Rosa" as the step-up from "Napa." If anything the "Santa Rosa" platform should be a downgrade that comes with a mustache, gets your 14 year-old daughter pregnant, and emanates an overpowering manure smell when it gets hot.
What's next? Lodi? Truckee? Daly City?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Why can't a multibillion-dollar company include a halfway decent graphics card in their motherboard design? Just because of that, millions of people find they can not run any games or upgrade to the latest desktop with 3D effects on their only computer.
There are three technologies (that I'm aware of) for using flash to cache disk. There are 'hybrid drives' where the flash is part of the hard drive, there's the Windows Vista method which uses a separately attached flash memory (typically USB), and there is this "Robson Technology" where it is on the motherboard.
It really seems to me that the 'hybrid drive' is the Right Thing to do. The cache contents is useless without the drive, and the drive is potentially corrupt without the cache contents, so why make them separable? With appropriate firmware, the hybrid drive can make the existence of the cache transparent to the OS, so no OS support is required (but you can allow the OS finer control over the cache if it does support it.) You also automatically add more cache as you add more drives.
(Incidentally, I hope MS doesn't have a patent on this - I thought of it years ago, and I'm not even an engineer.)
I can see the Windows method as a useful 'stop-gap' to get the benefit with a non-hybrid drive, but if you're buying new hardware anyway, why would you want to put the cache on the motherboard instead of the hard drive? The only advantage I can think of is that if you have multiple drives, you can dynamically allocate how much cache is associated with each drive, according to usage patterns.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Posted from MacBook connected to Apple Cinema Display, connected to OSX Server, listening to Apple iPod, connect to gf's iBook iTunes library, connected to MySQL DB via Cocoa MySQL hosted on dual-G5 xServe, checking JS using Drosera, all the while using Safari, Nightly Webkit and/or Camino.
Shall I draw you a flowchart in Omnigraffle, type up my intentions in TextEdit, upload it all via Transmit while recording my actions in SnapzProX?
Moof!
Where is the for this machine!?!?
Any news on how hard Intel will work to ensure that good free software exists for driving Santa Rosa's wifi, wired ethernet, and video chips?
There was also a cool device called the Psion 7 that could do most useful stuff and also had a good battery life.
Sure, both those devices are clunkers by today's standards but by using modern parts they could be made more slick and capable while still preserving battery life etc.
Bottom line is tht you don't need GHz to do most useful functions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
#21 on their list should have been the block-proof DHTML pop-up ad on the second page of their article.
(Score:3, Funny)
by Foamy (29271) on Mon 16 Apr 03:49PM (#18758627)
I can say that this lineup will come, by default, with wine glass, extra-large chrome SUV rims, and Starbucks coffee holder.
Oh, and it'll still whine about how little it has.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Or, quite possibly, discovering that you replied to the wrong article the very moment you hit "Submit"...
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
I want the compton 9mm chipset with enhanced southcentral bridge.
Turbo memory ... WTF ?? I worked at this pop-stand (Intel) in R+D and and watched this technology (code named Boxcar at the time) be developed starting back around 2003 with the original idea being just what you see here - a local cache for the hard drive. However I have to say that Turbo memory is about the lamest freakin name ... marketing at Intel always was a total crap shoot now it appears to be a total crapper. And I have no idea who this Robinson character is or if this Turbo crap is his doing.
.. as an attempt to get a PC to have a quasi instant on capability. Interesting idea but the thought of MS creating a "mini" anything as far as software goes pretty much shot that idea all to hell
Many of us platform types wanted to drop 50 - 100MB of this stuff onto the main motherboard to provide space for an OS mini-boot loader
Its not the years, its the mileage
So when will these new processors start showing up on the Dell and HP websites?
http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/classes/project_ report_cs497yyz.pdf
... ?
The paper above describes the power use of a laptop computer under various conditions. If the system is idling then the lcd can consume a lot more power than the cpu and hd combined. On the other hand, it is easy to come up with a bench mark where both the cpu and hd consume more than the lcd. The lcd is always a significant power user though whereas the cpu and hd aren't always. The most significant user of electricity is "the rest of the system". The component list is fairly detailed so I'm not entirely sure what comprises "the rest of the system" but it is almost always the most significant power user!