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

obsolete technology?

[getNewNickName]

Just a question, but doesn't flash-based HDs make this an obsolete technology already?

Flash on the MB or in a module?

[scdeimos]

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.

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.

Bloat reduction

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There was once a really nice device called the HP 200LX. That had an 8MHz processor and could do most useful functions without eyecandy. Battery life was weeks with typical usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200Lx

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.