Intel Launches New Santa Rosa Laptop Platform

Intel Corp. launched the "Santa Rosa" upgrade of its Centrino notebook platform, running on PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Gateway and others.

The new version adds longer battery life and faster computing to the technology bundle of a processor, chipset and wireless card. Intel will keep the name Centrino Duo for the consumer version, although changes include a faster Core 2 Duo processor, support for the draft version of 802.11n wireless networking and a Turbo Memory feature that supplements the standard hard drive with NAND flash for faster booting.

New processors launching include the 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo T7700 (the new top speed in Core 2 Duo mobile, up from 2.33 GHz), the 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7500, the 2-GHz T7300, and the 1.8-GHz T7100.

All are made with the same 65-nanometer process as previous Core 2 Duos. The 2-GHz and faster CPUs offer 4MB of L2 cache (just as the earlier T7000 line of chips did), while the new 1.8-GHz model has 2MB of cache. The new CPUs have better processing capabilities, thanks to improvements to their microarchitecture such as a full four-wide superscalar pipeline, which enables the processor to handle four instructions per clock; macro fusion capabilities, which allow the processor to combine several commonly used instructions into a single instruction for more efficient execution; and Intel's Advanced Smart Cache, which is optimized to reduce access times to frequently used data. The CPUs also have better power management, permitting them to turn off a portion of a core that's not in use, say, or to turn off a core altogether while boosting the speed of the other core as needed.