Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Intel's Santa Rosa Mobile Platform
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 09:00 PM
"Today, Intel is launching its next-generation Santa Rosa notebook platform, which it has been discussing ever since last year’s Spring Intel Developer Forum. Ever since the initial Centrino incarnation, which was such a massive departure from anything before it, Intel has made constant incremental improvements to its platform...Being increasingly conscious about improving battery life, Intel has introduced a number of new power saving features. When the notebook is in a lower power state, the front side bus can be dynamically throttled back to reduce the core voltage, enabling the chip to enter a lower power active state known as Super LFM. It’s possible for each of the cores to independently enter Super LFM, meaning that if only one of the cores is active, the other can save power by running at a much lower frequency."
I really like laptops - I resisted buying one for years, but when I got my first one in 2000, I was hooked. I find it incredibly useful to grab a laptop and head out the door, knowing that I can do almost anything I need on one. Laptops as a whole though are still some combination of too big, too loud, too heavy, too slow, and don't last long enough on a battery charge (trust me, there's always something wrong with every laptop on the market). Intel continues to make improvements though, and the Santa Rosa platform looks like a significant boost: more speed, more power savings, better all-around laptops.
Two things got me particularly excited though: one, Santa Rosa laptops will have the ability to dynamically scale back one core and overclock the other core, giving you a boost in single-threaded applications. Given the lack of proper multi-threaded applications, this is a welcome change. The other exciting thing is Turbo Memory: it's basically ReadyBoost slapped onto the motherboard. This means you'll have a Flash memory chip (either 512 MB or 1 GB in size) that Vista will use as a ReadyBoost drive, without having to keep anything plugged into your USB port. When you combine that with some of the newer hard drives with Flash memory buffers, you get a very different kind of laptop. 2007 is going to be a very big year for laptops!
I really like laptops - I resisted buying one for years, but when I got my first one in 2000, I was hooked. I find it incredibly useful to grab a laptop and head out the door, knowing that I can do almost anything I need on one. Laptops as a whole though are still some combination of too big, too loud, too heavy, too slow, and don't last long enough on a battery charge (trust me, there's always something wrong with every laptop on the market). Intel continues to make improvements though, and the Santa Rosa platform looks like a significant boost: more speed, more power savings, better all-around laptops.
Two things got me particularly excited though: one, Santa Rosa laptops will have the ability to dynamically scale back one core and overclock the other core, giving you a boost in single-threaded applications. Given the lack of proper multi-threaded applications, this is a welcome change. The other exciting thing is Turbo Memory: it's basically ReadyBoost slapped onto the motherboard. This means you'll have a Flash memory chip (either 512 MB or 1 GB in size) that Vista will use as a ReadyBoost drive, without having to keep anything plugged into your USB port. When you combine that with some of the newer hard drives with Flash memory buffers, you get a very different kind of laptop. 2007 is going to be a very big year for laptops!
