Intel Corp.’s next-generation mobile platform, which is due to be released early next year will sport DirectX 10-compatible graphics core among other innovations. The new platform code-named Santa Rosa will be feature an unprecedented amount of innovations, it transpires.

Slides, which are presumably from Intel’s roadmap, published by HKEPC web-site claim that the new chipsets for mobile platforms code-named Crestline will feature a graphics core compatible with DirectX 10 specifications. It is very highly likely that the new mobile graphics core will resemble Intel’s Graphics Media Accelerator 3000-series found in the upcoming desktop chipsets.

The Intel GMA 3000 will be generally significantly more advanced compared to the current- and previous-generations of Intel’s built-in graphics cores. The new core will have improved early-Z technology which reduces the load on memory bandwidth, it will support 16x anisotropic filtering, 32-bit precision floating point calculations and so on. Additionally, thanks to unified shader processing engines, the GMA 3000 will support hardware decoding of H.264 and WMV9b high-definition video streams.

A competitive built-in graphics core would further increase pressure on providers of discrete graphics processors for notebooks. Even now integrated graphics processors dominate all market segments, reducing market shares of companies like ATI and Nvidia.

Intel’s code-named Santa Rosa mobile platform will feature code-named Merom processor with 800MHz processor system bus, new core-logic code-named Crestline with DirectX 10 shader model 4.0-compatible built-in graphics core, Intel NAND technology that boosts performance of hard disk drives, code-named Kedron wireless network controller compliant with an 802.11n standard, which will increase bandwidth to up to 600Mb/s, and some other innovations. Instead of BIOS, the new platform will support UEFI, an interface that helps hand off control of the system for the pre-boot environment (i.e.: after the system is powered on, but before the operating system starts) to an operating system, such as Windows or Linux.

Intel did not comment on the news-story.