X-bit labs

Santa Rosa + Vista: Three Notebooks Reviewed (page 7)

Category: Mobile

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/04/2007 | 04:18 PM ]

What’s Next?

Although the mobile Santa Rosa platform is currently quite acute, its life cycle is going to be over soon. And the reason lies not even in the upcoming launch of the Penryn processor family manufactured with 45nm process. As I have already mentioned above, these CPUs will be quite compatible with the existing platform. Moreover, the first notebooks with these new mobile processors that are due in early 2008 will be based exactly on the described Centrino Duo platform.

However in Q2 2008 Santa Rosa will finally get out-of-date. This will be the time when a new platform, also known as Montevina, will come to replace Santa Rosa. The main advantage of this upcoming platform will be smaller size of all components that will open many doors to even more portable mobile systems than the ones we have today.

Among other advantages of the new platform I would like to point out new 1067MHz processor bus, more economical DDR3 SDRAM and a faster graphics core with 10 unified pipelines supporting Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Montevina platform will also feature a new network component with the promising WiMAX technology support.