
Intel Spills Beans On Santa Rosa Notebook Platform 96
Steve Kerrison writes "From the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing comes news of the successor to the Napa notebook platform. Santa Rosa, which will head up Intel's notebook technology line-up until 2H 2008, beefs up almost everything seen in Napa, from graphics to WiFi. 'Santa Rosa carries Robson Technology, now known as Intel Turbo Memory, the flash-based disc-caching system that speeds up loading times of frequently-used data. Santa Rosa is an obvious continuation of the Centrino series. There will also be another Santa Rosa Centrino variant — Pro — that covers the business features found on Intel's Q-series chipsets, namely vPro.' Intel's Core2 mobile processors remain a key part of the platform, as you'd expect, with 45nm 'Penryn' CPUs making their way into the Santa Rosa refresh in 2008."
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If the NY Times has an ad on a new blockbuster movie does that prevent the moview reviewer from creating a real review based on his/her opinion? Of course not. The movie reviewer had nothing to do with the ad, just as I'm sure most (if not all) slashdot editors had nothing to do with the Intel opinion center or any of the advertisements coming up on slashdot.
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Too...many...codewords/brand names... (Score:4, Insightful)
Santa Rosa?
Robson Technology?
Intel Turbo Memory?
Q-series?
vPro?
Penryn?
My brain can't take any more buzz.
Re:Too...many...codewords/brand names... (Score:4, Funny)
Santa Rosa eXtreme
Robson eXtreme Technology
Intel eXtreme Turbo Memory
Q-series eXtreme
vPro eXtreme
Penryn Xtreme Core 2
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Lighten up Stevie (Score:1, Offtopic)
Shall I draw you a flowchart in Omnigraffle, type up my intentions in TextEdit, upload it all via Transmit while recording my actions in SnapzProX?
Moof!
Get a sense of humor too! (Score:1)
(Score:3, Funny)
by Foamy (29271) on Mon 16 Apr 03:49PM (#18758627)
Re:Too...many...codewords/brand names... (Score:5, Funny)
It's really OK.
Look at that, a shiny thing outside the window!
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Boy, did that help for those games that timed things in instruction cycles rather than a high-res clock.
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Review Intel drops a Nehalem bomb on AMD's Fusion: integrated graphics, on-die memory controller, SMT [arstechnica.com]
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Maybe it's my geeky math side, but version numbers have always just sort of made sense to me. Is this an increase from the Pentium 4.3.1 to the 4.3.2, or is it from 4.3.1 to 4.4.0? Even if you have no idea what the numbers mean, you can look at it, and it *means* something. If the middle number increases, you need a new motherboard or whatever.
Trying to discuss anything today is just retarded:
"bro,
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I really feel for them. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I really feel for them. (Score:4, Funny)
Its actually part of the design - the thing will now fart to cool itself or to reduce load by getting the user to leave the keyboard. Their marketing motto - "You'll be blown away!"
They were going to use jumping beans, but they realized the CPU already has a bunch of JMP instructions.
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obsolete technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Okay, I don't know where I pulled my number out of.. SATA2 is actually 3Gbits/sec.
And from Ars Technica:
Re:obsolete technology? (Score:5, Informative)
First Gen SATA = 1.5Gb/sec = 150 MB/sec
Gen 2 SATA = 3.0Gb/sec = 300 MB/sec
First Gen PCIe = 2.5Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, so x1 = 250 MB/sec full duplex (marketing types sometimes say this is 500MB/sec)
Gen 2 PCIe = 5.0Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, x1 = 500 MB/sec full duplex.
I guess the big difference here is that PCIe is full duplex, SATA is not.
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To clear things up- both SATA and PCIe employ 8b/10b encoding. Each byte is trasmitted as a 10 bit symbol. So 3.0Gb/sec = 300MB/sec.
First Gen PCIe = 2.5Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, so x1 = 250 MB/sec full duplex (marketing types sometimes say this is 500MB/sec) Gen 2 PCIe = 5.0Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, x1 = 500 MB/sec full duplex.
You're sort of right, except 2.5 Gbit/s with 8b/10b encoding results in 2 Gbit/s of data ~ 238 MB/s
So a full duplex PCI-E x1 lane is theoretically capable of about 477 MB/s
Your SATA rates become 1.2 and 2.4 Gbit/s, 143 MB/s and 286 MB/s
Mind you those are apples to oranges comparisons, there isn't much sense in comparing PCI-E to SATA. The narrowest PCI-E link in your system might be a whole four lanes wide anyway.
You'd have to do a lot more research to find more realistic peak data rates, I'm
Where are the pci-e flash cards (Score:2)
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Just a question, but doesn't flash-based HDs make this an obsolete technology already?
When solid-state hard drives catch up to magnetic platter based hard drives in total capacity, price-per-GB, and expected life expectancy, then Robson technology might be obsolete. When solid-state hard drives become available for Fujitsu notebooks, the 16GB drive will be a $700 option and the 32GB drive will be a $1200 option [arstechnica.com]. A 64GB drive has been announced by Samsung [arstechnica.com], but who knows how much that will cost?
Last time I checked, magnetic platter based notebook hard drives have reached 250GB. Some big Del
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su
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System Memory (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have been told that is an OS limitation, it has nothing to do with the platform (i.e. Vista 64 will recognize all 4GB).
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No, MacBooks and MacBook Pros suffer from this chipset limitation (it is actually about 3.3GB or so), and MacOS X is 64bit capable. Mac Pros can handle up to 16GB of memory.
I'm pretty sure Santa Rosa lifts that particular restriction, but I don't have a source for that.
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However the Mac OS X kernel / VM subsystem, even on Intel, knows how to deal with greater then 32 bit physical addresses and supports DMA to/from such addresses. For example Mac Pros support and will use up to 16 GiB of RAM.
Re:System Memory (Score:4, Informative)
This is all outlined in the developer docs for the Intel® 975X Express Chipset [intel.com]
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Incremental improvements (Score:1, Insightful)
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Under Linux I got my old Clamshell iBook's power usage down to 8W, and that's without CPU frequency scaling.
For that matter, I couldn't get it to go ABOVE 15W.
With one of those new high-capacity batteries that worked out to more than 12 hours of battery life. 8+ under normal use.
Not too shabby if you ask me.
Shame I broke my battery. >_<
-:sigma.SB
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Bloat reduction (Score:3, Interesting)
There was also a cool device called the Psion 7 that could do most useful stuff and also had a good battery life.
Sure, both those devices are clunkers by today's standards but by using modern parts they could be made more slick and capable while still preserving battery life etc.
Bottom line is
Awesome! (Score:1)
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Flash on the MB or in a module? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe someone can answer this question for me: Is the flash memory for this integrated into an SMD chip on the motherboard (like the north- or south-bridge chips), or is it a plug-in module like a SIMM/DIMM?
Flash memory wears out, the current generation only being good for a few tens-of-millions of write cycles per page. Most flash-based USB memory sticks get around this by reserving about 5% slack-space and using wear-levelling internally (similarly to JFFS). Even so, they eventually run out of usable blocks and the host computer will see block checksum errors on writing.
If "Intel Turbo Memory" is on-chip and can't be disabled in the CMOS setup I can see people having to throw away motherboards that would otherwise be perfectly useful.
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A question about the notebooks these will go in (Score:2)
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But if you're asking whether they will affect size or battery life, the answer is no. Robson caching will, however, allow the hard drive greater downtime, which in turn will extend battery life, lower internal temperature (because the hard drive will not have to spin up as often), and therefore further (marginally) improve battery life in a second way thanks to lower cooling system demands and be
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So the answer is yes, they improve battery life. How much? How disk intensive is your app?
Santa Rosa surpasses Napa? Since when? (Score:1, Funny)
What's next? Lodi? Truckee? Daly City?
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And that's the end of it.
If any company names a product after this shithole of a town, it's a sure sign they are declaring bankruptcy next week.
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Should be in the list of 20 worst techs ever (Score:2)
Re:Should be in the list of 20 worst techs ever (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see why they need to have something more powerful than that though; people with more advanced needs just buy a laptop with an actual graphics card instead of integrated graphics.
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Flash cache - why on the motherboard? (Score:5, Insightful)
It really seems to me that the 'hybrid drive' is the Right Thing to do. The cache contents is useless without the drive, and the drive is potentially corrupt without the cache contents, so why make them separable? With appropriate firmware, the hybrid drive can make the existence of the cache transparent to the OS, so no OS support is required (but you can allow the OS finer control over the cache if it does support it.) You also automatically add more cache as you add more drives.
(Incidentally, I hope MS doesn't have a patent on this - I thought of it years ago, and I'm not even an engineer.)
I can see the Windows method as a useful 'stop-gap' to get the benefit with a non-hybrid drive, but if you're buying new hardware anyway, why would you want to put the cache on the motherboard instead of the hard drive? The only advantage I can think of is that if you have multiple drives, you can dynamically allocate how much cache is associated with each drive, according to usage patterns.
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The hardware and OS support is orthogonal; Vista supports all three kinds of flash.
It really seems to me that the 'hybrid drive' is the Right Thing to do. The cache contents is useless without the drive, and the drive is potentially corrupt without the cache contents, so why ma
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Fair point.
You can remove a hard disk from a notebook, but it's not exactly easy so I don't think that's much of a concern.
Power saving is just one reason for flash cache, so it isn't (or shouldn't be) restricted to notebooks. On desktop, the major advantage would be boot speed, with general speed and noise reduction as secondary benefits. I expect you'd use more of it for reading and less for writing than for a la
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If you lost a hard drive or had to reimage this would be very useful for a mobile workforce.
Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
#21 (Score:2)
Or (Score:2, Funny)
Coming from a Santa Rosa native (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, and it'll still whine about how little it has.
Retro-Marketing (Score:1)
Many
Intel New Stuff (Score:1)