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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."
Santa Rosa?
Robson Technology?
Intel Turbo Memory?
Q-series?
vPro?
Penryn?
My brain can't take any more buzz.
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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...
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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.