Intel Santa Rosa Preview: Centrino V Evolves
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 10, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Final Words:
Intel's Centrino platform has been the sum of a series of evolutionary steps, each building on a very solid foundation originally introduced in 2003. Each step along the way brought us new technologies, better performance, and longer battery life. Unfortunately, with such high expectations for constant improvements in performance and power efficiency, it's not too difficult to feel let down by Santa Rosa; there's simply no tangible performance improvement for the vast majority of applications. For the first Centrino platform with no major CPU enhancements, we have to look to the platform for the real attraction to Santa Rosa.
The inclusion of 802.11n is a nice feature, however later versions of Intel's Napa Centrino platform began shipping with 802.11n support, which steals some of Santa Rosa's thunder. Santa Rosa does bring improved integrated graphics, in theory, but without being able to test it we're unsure of its impact on notebook usability and battery life.
That leaves Intel's Turbo Memory as the saving grace for the platform. While we would love to give you the final verdict on Intel's Turbo Memory today, we simply can't. From what we've seen, it's unimpressive, however Intel does claim that we should be seeing more than what we are. When we find out why, you'll be the first to know, until then - we see no reason to upgrade.
If you're in the market for a new notebook anyway, Santa Rosa becomes a lot more attractive. It comes with all the latest features, and with NVIDIA's newly launched GeForce 8M Series you could get DirectX 10 support in the mix as well. Assuming relative price parity between Napa and Santa Rosa notebooks, there's quite a bit of new hardware available starting today. If you've been waiting for the right time to buy a new notebook, your wait may be drawing to a close. If you already have a decent laptop, however, we wouldn't rush out to replace it anytime soon.
Intel's Centrino platform has been the sum of a series of evolutionary steps, each building on a very solid foundation originally introduced in 2003. Each step along the way brought us new technologies, better performance, and longer battery life. Unfortunately, with such high expectations for constant improvements in performance and power efficiency, it's not too difficult to feel let down by Santa Rosa; there's simply no tangible performance improvement for the vast majority of applications. For the first Centrino platform with no major CPU enhancements, we have to look to the platform for the real attraction to Santa Rosa.
The inclusion of 802.11n is a nice feature, however later versions of Intel's Napa Centrino platform began shipping with 802.11n support, which steals some of Santa Rosa's thunder. Santa Rosa does bring improved integrated graphics, in theory, but without being able to test it we're unsure of its impact on notebook usability and battery life.
That leaves Intel's Turbo Memory as the saving grace for the platform. While we would love to give you the final verdict on Intel's Turbo Memory today, we simply can't. From what we've seen, it's unimpressive, however Intel does claim that we should be seeing more than what we are. When we find out why, you'll be the first to know, until then - we see no reason to upgrade.
If you're in the market for a new notebook anyway, Santa Rosa becomes a lot more attractive. It comes with all the latest features, and with NVIDIA's newly launched GeForce 8M Series you could get DirectX 10 support in the mix as well. Assuming relative price parity between Napa and Santa Rosa notebooks, there's quite a bit of new hardware available starting today. If you've been waiting for the right time to buy a new notebook, your wait may be drawing to a close. If you already have a decent laptop, however, we wouldn't rush out to replace it anytime soon.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
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