Intel today announced its next generation Santa Rosa Centrino platform. Over the past years, details of various aspects of the platform have leaked out such as the processors used, Robson NAND flash technology and the new Draft-N wireless adapter.
"When we introduced Intel Centrino 4 years ago, Intel changed the computing landscape with our mobile innovations," said Intel Mobile Products Group VP and general manager Mooly Eden. "Now, simply said, we have improved virtually all aspects of Intel-based notebooks, the most popular and fastest growing computing market segment in the world."
The new Merom-based Core 2 Duo processors are still based on a 65nm manufacturing process but now feature an 800MHz front side bus (up from 667MHz). Intel has also introduced Super Low Frequency Mode (Super LFM) and Enhanced Intel Deeper Sleep to reduce power consumption when idle.
The chipset used with Santa Rosa is the Intel Mobile 965 Express (PM965). It is essentially a rejigged version of the 965 Express Broadwater chipset introduced for desktop last year. The PM965 northbridge is paired with the ICH8M southbridge. It supports 10 USB 2.0 connections, three 3Gbps SATA ports, GbE and six PCIe x1 lanes. ICH8M also supports Intel Active Management Technology 2.5 (AMT 2.5).
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