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."

Comments

Re:Too...many...codewords/brand names...

[644bd346996]

Ignoring the fact that those are codenames, how is that at all consistent with with apple's branding conventions? They only "extreme" products are the Airport Extreme (not eXtreme) and Quartz Extreme. There is also no evidence whatsoever that Apple will be extending the use of the "Extreme" modifier to many other products. Right now, apple- branding is on the rise, and i- and Mac- branding make up most of the rest of their product line. Have you been too busy trolling to notice the names of the products you bash?

Re:System Memory

[shawnce]

No it is a limit of the chipset. The Napa chipset only support 32 bit physical addressing and a portion of that physical addressing range (starting from the largest address on down) is reserved for interfacing with the south bridge, PCIe buses, integrated graphics (if being used), etc. How much gets reserved is under software control but IIRC at least 256 MiB if not 512 MiB must be reserved. Also if certain hardware features are being used more must be reserved.

This is all outlined in the developer docs for the Intel® 975X Express Chipset

Re:Should be in the list of 20 worst techs ever

[TomHandy]

The Intel GMA950 graphics do just fine for integrated graphics, as does GMAX3000 (part of Santa Rosa). They can both certainly play some games, and can certainly handle the 3D effects in Vista or OS X.

I don't see why they need to have something more powerful than that though; people with more advanced needs just buy a laptop with an actual graphics card instead of integrated graphics.

Re:obsolete technology?

[cheezedawg]

To clear things up- both SATA and PCIe employ 8b/10b encoding. Each byte is trasmitted as a 10 bit symbol. So 3.0Gb/sec = 300MB/sec.

First Gen SATA = 1.5Gb/sec = 150 MB/sec
Gen 2 SATA = 3.0Gb/sec = 300 MB/sec

First Gen PCIe = 2.5Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, so x1 = 250 MB/sec full duplex (marketing types sometimes say this is 500MB/sec)
Gen 2 PCIe = 5.0Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, x1 = 500 MB/sec full duplex.

I guess the big difference here is that PCIe is full duplex, SATA is not.