Centrino Pro is the business version of the Santa Rosa platform.
Improvements to the processor, chipset and wireless components of Intel's latest mobile platform should result in a new generation of faster notebooks with longer battery life. Business systems will also get Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) for the first time, while Turbo Memory should reduce the frequency of hard disk accesses, saving power and boosting performance.
At the heart of Intel's new mobile platform is the processor, chipset and wireless combination codenamed Santa Rosa. Business notebooks built on the Santa Rosa platform will be branded Centrino Pro, while consumer systems will carry the existing Centrino Duo branding. Intel has upgraded all three platform elements, in its continuing efforts to increase notebook performance while reducing power consumption. However, not all of the components are very different to their previous versions.
Intel's new Santa Rosa mobile platform includes upgrades to the processor, chipset and wireless modules, and adds new functionality such as Turbo Memory.
Processor
The processor has changed the least. It's a 65nm Merom-based Core 2 Duo with a few tweaks, and will be the last of these CPUs before the arrival of 45nm Penryn processors in the next update. The major change between Santa Rosa's processor and its predecessors is the acceleration of the frontside bus (FSB) from 667MHz to 800MHz , together with the ability to slow it down during light loads. This technology, called Super Low Frequency Mode, knocks the bus speed down to 400MHz, the CPU's clock speed to 600MHz and reduces the core voltage. Another tweak, called Enhanced Deeper Sleep, means that the memory controller in the chipset won't wake up the processor to check on cache status if the system knows the cache is empty and the CPU is sufficiently comatose not to be able to change things.
A rather unusual performance boost comes in the form of Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology. The Santa Rosa processor can run one of its two cores at full tilt while the other is in one of a number of sleep states, at which time the total thermal energy is somewhat less than the maximum allowed when both cores are running. Under conditions where only one core is running, Intel can effectively overclock it, taking advantage of the increased thermal headroom left by the other core ticking over. This will give single-threaded tasks a boost, says Intel, without risking overheating.
Turbo Memory, formerly code-named Robson, is a NAND flash hard disk cache that's designed to reduce boot times, boost performance and conserve battery life.
More performance, and lower power consumption, comes from a flash-based hard disk cache called Turbo Memory. Previously codenamed Robson, this devotes 512MB or 1GB of NAND flash memory to holding system files and other data that the operating system requires at start-up, restoring from sleep or during application switches. Intel claims that with a suitable operating system -- and Windows Vista is designed for this -- Turbo Memory can more than halve application load and wake-from-sleep times, while adding up to twenty minutes to battery life. Like any cache, its performance can vary according to how it's used, the mixture of reads and writes and the nature of the data sets it handles. However, with luck and application, the advantages will increase as programmers learn how to write optimal code and as flash memory gets bigger and better.
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