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

Too...many...codewords/brand names...

[fishybell]

Krikey...

Santa Rosa?
Robson Technology?
Intel Turbo Memory?
Q-series?
vPro?
Penryn?

My brain can't take any more buzz.

System Memory

[Smitty825]

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...

Re:System Memory

[lmnfrs]

One of the current limitations (IMHO) of the current Napa based systems is the fact that system memory is limited to 3GB.

I have been told that is an OS limitation, it has nothing to do with the platform (i.e. Vista 64 will recognize all 4GB).

Incremental improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Flash cache - why on the motherboard?

[Michael Woodhams]

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.

Linux?

[DoofusOfDeath]

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?