Intel Santa Rosa Preview: Centrino V Evolves
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 10, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
The Test:
For our test Intel sent us an unbranded OEM whitebook built around its new Santa Rosa platform. While serving as a fine platform to test Santa Rosa on, it didn't give us much opportunity for direct comparison to other Centrino designs. Given that the Santa Rosa Merom CPU and the Napa Merom CPU aren't interchangeable due to different pinouts, developing an apples to apples comparison became rather difficult.
We turned to our original Napa test platfrom from our first Merom article, the ASUS Z96j. Outfitted with a Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz), and the same DDR2-667 memory and hard drive from our Santa Rosa test bed, it was the closest competitor we could find. Of course the Z96j used a mobility Radeon X1600 while our Santa Rosa test platform used a GeForce 8600M, so we couldn't perform any 3D gaming tests comparing the two (there will be a follow-on article looking at the performance of the GeForce 8M series of GPUs).
Using two very different notebooks made battery life comparisons meaningless: they had different screens, different GPUs and different batteries. But we did look at average power consumption between the two notebooks to give us some indication of the battery life of this new Centrino platform compared to its predecessor.
Honestly there's much more testing that has to be done in order to give us a true verdict on the Santa Rosa Centrino platform, the majority of which will force us to wait for a better test platform. The verdict is still not out on Turbo Memory as you've already seen and we do need to look at the range and power consumption of Intel's 802.11n solution compared to its competition in the market. Once better Santa Rosa platforms become available for us to test, you can expect a follow-up to this article focusing on what we've left out.
Note that in our charts we have two Santa Rosa bars, one listed as w/ TM, indicating that Turbo Memory was enabled for that configuration.
| Santa Rosa Test Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz, 4MB Unified Cache) |
| Chipset | Intel PM965 (800MHz FSB) |
| RAM | DDR2-667 (2x1GB), 5-5-5-15 |
| Networking | Intel 82566MM Gigabit, Intel 4965AGN WiFi (802.11n) |
| Hard Drive | Hitachi 7K100 80GB |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel - 8.2.0.1014 |
| Video System | NVIDIA GeForce 8600M |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA 158.18 |
| Audio | Intel HD Audio |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
| . | |
| NAPA Test Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz, 4MB Unified Cache) |
| Chipset | Intel 945PM (667MHz FSB) |
| RAM | DDR2-667 (2x1GB), 5-5-5-15 |
| Networking | Integrated Gigabit LAN, Intel Pro Wireless 3945 (802.11g) |
| Hard Drive | Hitachi 7K100 80GB |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel - 8.2.0.1014 |
| Video System | ATI Radeon X1600 |
| Video Drivers | ATI V8.352.1 |
| Audio | Intel HD Audio |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
| . | |
For our test Intel sent us an unbranded OEM whitebook built around its new Santa Rosa platform. While serving as a fine platform to test Santa Rosa on, it didn't give us much opportunity for direct comparison to other Centrino designs. Given that the Santa Rosa Merom CPU and the Napa Merom CPU aren't interchangeable due to different pinouts, developing an apples to apples comparison became rather difficult.
We turned to our original Napa test platfrom from our first Merom article, the ASUS Z96j. Outfitted with a Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz), and the same DDR2-667 memory and hard drive from our Santa Rosa test bed, it was the closest competitor we could find. Of course the Z96j used a mobility Radeon X1600 while our Santa Rosa test platform used a GeForce 8600M, so we couldn't perform any 3D gaming tests comparing the two (there will be a follow-on article looking at the performance of the GeForce 8M series of GPUs).
Using two very different notebooks made battery life comparisons meaningless: they had different screens, different GPUs and different batteries. But we did look at average power consumption between the two notebooks to give us some indication of the battery life of this new Centrino platform compared to its predecessor.
Honestly there's much more testing that has to be done in order to give us a true verdict on the Santa Rosa Centrino platform, the majority of which will force us to wait for a better test platform. The verdict is still not out on Turbo Memory as you've already seen and we do need to look at the range and power consumption of Intel's 802.11n solution compared to its competition in the market. Once better Santa Rosa platforms become available for us to test, you can expect a follow-up to this article focusing on what we've left out.
Note that in our charts we have two Santa Rosa bars, one listed as w/ TM, indicating that Turbo Memory was enabled for that configuration.
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Cat - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
I thought Santa Rosa was going to have a low-power display mode that effectively used interlacing. Did I just imagine this?IntelUser2000 - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
Yea, LCD's twist pixel(something like that) to refresh screen, but on apps that doesn't require high refresh(like word for example) it'll lower the twisting rate.
Though I don't know if its in the system AT reviewed. I think this is probably the worst review Anand himself ever did.
mongoosesRawesome - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
I've read that the Santa Rosa CPU's can shut down one core in single threaded applications and overclock the other core in order to increase performance, all while maintaining the same thermal envelope.How much overclocking are we talking about? Is the performance increase tangible? Can you test this?
Does one core shut down in idle mode anyways?
IntelUser2000 - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
It clocks one speed bin higher(eg. 2.4 to 2.6GHz) when one core is idle(single threaded apps) and is available on non-extreme Core 2 Duo mobile processors.
coolme - Wednesday, May 16, 2007 - link
Can you provide more specifics? What exactly does it do? Increase bus speed? or increase multiplier? When exactly does the process kick in? Possible benchmarks?retrospooty - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
that with all the hype about the flash memory dramatically improving speed, that Intel would allow pre-release benchmarking to be done without at least a solid explanation as to why it isn't any faster. I wonder whats up with that.Freddo - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
In the CPU table on the 2nd page, what exactly is the Median Average Power value? How many watt the CPU use while it's on idle doing "nothing" and the OS is on?1W is very little, which is nice, and would give long battery times if one keep doing things that doesn't require much CPU power, like simple stuff in Word, Excel and so on.
If that's the case, the difference between the T and L series is much smaller than I expected too, considering the L CPUs have a noticeably lower TDP.
Or am I totally off the hook here?
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
Yea, you got the general idea of it. Intel isn't specific about it either. It's pretty ambigous claim. It's usually quoted as: "Average power consumption while doing typical tasks" or "Average power consumption while running mobilemark to simulate typical tasks". I'd guess it is office stuff like Word.
The Core 2 Duo chips on the Santa Rosa platform has enhanced deeper sleep power of 1.2W and the LV editions are 0.8W. I'd guess that's pretty close to what they are claiming. The more important power consumption figures are the ones in HFM/LFM mode. Santa Rosa platform adds Super LFM, and reduces TDP at that level significantly. This POS adobe reader won't load so I can't quote the figures, but the numbers are quite lower than the one based on Napa.
Freddo - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
Thanks for the info :)fehu - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
Maybe this tecnology start working when vista know what are the most common used file and preload them on the robson module