santa rosa

Hi all, just have a few questions

How will the santa rosa platform improve the macbook pro (compared to the core 2 duo)?
When will the macbook pro w/ the santa rosa platform come out?
When it does come out, will there be a big price difference?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino#Santa_Rosa_platform_.282007.29

I'm gonna assume the Macbook Pro will be equipped with Santa Rosa as soon as it's released.

I don't think there will be a price difference compared to the current laptops. Apple tends to keep their price around the same.

 

what does the wikipedia article mean in laymens terms?

 

It means they made it easy to understand for people who do not know much about computers.

 

The MacBook Pro with the Santa Rosa platform should see some of the same theoretical benefits as other laptops. Note that they still use Core 2 Duo processors; it is an upgraded platform overall.

The Santa Rosa platform includes a faster architecture which should allow for some performance improvements. It also includes integrated Flash memory which the system is supposed to use for faster data access and should conceivably extend battery life. It also includes 802.11n wireless, although Apple has already been including that.

Aside from Santa Rosa itself, the MacBook Pro might possibly also see other improvements to go along with the new platform. The current MacBook Pro is still using a basic design that has been relatively unchanged since the original PowerBook G4 was released. Apple didn't make any design changes when they did the initial switch from PowerPC to Intel because they wanted to emphasize the idea that even though they were changing the CPU's inside their computer to Intel chips, they were still Macs.

Now that the Intel transition is complete and everyone is comfortable with it, Apple now has more freedom to finally update the design, etc. of their systems, including the MacBook Pro.

This is all speculation, but I personally do expect the upcoming MacBook Pro revision to come sometime in June or July, and to include other design enhancements on top of the internal changes.

-Zadillo

 

Truthly, I don't think the Santa Rosa platform in itself will bring much worthwhile benefits. As mentioned by zadillo, the three major components of Santa Rosa relevent to the MBP are the 800MHz FSB, Robson flash cache, and 802.11n. A 800MHz FSB, isn't likely to yield any benefits since the Merom architecture seems very bandwidth efficient, and Apple already uses all 4MB L2 cache anyways which largely mitigates the benefits. Robson flash cache should improve boot times, but that is only with OS support. (Clock speeds only go up from 2.33GHz to 2.4GHz initially so it's irrelevent. There are supposed to be Mobile Extreme Editions coming out but they look to have SpeedStep disabled so I doubt Apple will use it.) Robson was designed for Vista and doesn't work with XP, and so far Apple hasn't announced that Leopard will support it. It could be one of those secret features that Apple hinted at but we don't know. The last, 802.11n, the current MBP already have from Atheros. Apple tends to use third-party wireless cards anyways so it's doubtful that they will switch. There are some more advanced power saving features coming with Santa Rosa, but given that the new chipset seems much more power hungry and the 800MHz FSB chews up quite a bit of power too, the end result of the new features is probably to keep power consumption stable.

Santa Rosa will mainly benefit the MacBook, since the new GMA X3000 should be a decent IGP and they are claiming DX10 support, which may not mean much for Macs, but still means unified shaders which can be implemented in OpenGL. (OpenGL 2.1 I believe).

The "real" performance boost will come at the end of 2007 or early 2008 when the 45nm Penryn is released. That will have a refined architecture over Merom. However, it's unclear whether Santa Rosa will support Penryn since there is a new chipset scheduled for 2008.

 

Indeed ltcommander_data.

Although given all the rumors about Apple's planned use of flash memory, etc. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was going to be in Leopard.

I think if anyone is currently thinking about waiting, the reason to wait would be more for things like a chassis redesign, etc. to accompany Santa Rosa, not necessarily Santa Rosa itself. The MacBook Pro is long overdue for an overhaul in design, etc. and this would be an appropriate time to unleash a more significant design overhaul.

 

Do you think Apple will release a new design for the Macbook?

 

I don't think the MacBook will be re-designed right away; frankly it's a pretty solid design for its purpose; if it is redesigned I think it would be fairly minor.

The MBP at this point is the model whose overall design is kind of long in the tooth (as I mentioned above, it's still part of the same basic design that debuted in 2001).

 

Bigger reason to wait is for possibility of LED backlit screens on the MBP. That, and perhaps a case redesign at least, if not a redesign of the internals to make the HDD user-upgradeable like on the MB.

Santa Rosa itself, at least to me, is secondary to the above.

I really hope if they update the MBP it will have as good if not better battery life than the current models. And please, no heat issues...

 

I'm praying that they aren't going to use the LED screens as an excuse to make the MBP thinner. Frankly, 1" is thinner enough and any more it'll look like it'll snap in half if you lift it from a corner. I hope that they use the space savings from LED screens to make the main chassis thicker while maintaining the 1" overall height. Making the main chassis thicker will solve a lot of the heat issues and allow a return of slim DVD drives versus the super slims they are using now. The PowerBooks used to have front vents on either side along the bottom like where the DVD drive is and I never understood why they got rid of them in the MBP.

In terms of the MacBook I doubt they would have a redesign so soon. It's just a year old. The only reason for a redesign would be if they are adding a discrete GPU since the thermal requirements would be different, but if the GMA X3000 is decent I doubt they would bother. The MBP and iMac are in greater need for a design refresh and there has been talk about those, so I think they would get priority. There were also talks of a 15" MacBook, but that would probably be designed consistant with the current 13.3" rather than a completely new design.

 

And frankly, I think the MBP design is still better than 90% of the laptops out there. I can't believe that design was from 2001.

For the Macbook, I think they can add some reinforcements on the case. My Macbook tends to squeak when I pick it up. It would be awesome if Apple's laptop were built like Thinkpads.

 

Can OS X make use of the integrated flash memory or is that something that is solely going to help Vista boot times?

 

there's no reason it couldn't... it's just not confirmed that Apple has added the capability to utilize it, although they would be crazy no to.

 

There's been rumors that Apple is working on this.

Generally speaking they've been working very closely with Intel on taking advantage of their new technologies, so it seems very likely they will be building in support to take advantage of integrated Flash memory.

 

I'm quite certain even if there is no OS support, hybrid hard-drives will still help performance. Hard drives are pretty much the slowest devices in the computer these days (aside from the optical drive perhaps) and just like a hard drive with more cache, hybrid hard drives will bring more performance, regardless of the OS.

Robson was something a little different - as in NAND built into the system itself or as an add-on card. I'm pretty sure Intel's leaving that up to laptop manufacturers and not requiring it for their Santa Rosa platform itself. That would probably require more OS interaction to prove beneficial, but since hybrid hard drives are the domain of the hdd manufacturers themselves, I think they'll be able to optimize for it with the controller chips on the hard drive itself.

I see more laptop manufacturers opting for the hybrid hard drive route as opposed to the built-in NAND on the platform.

 

Sadly I don't think that's true that hyrid hard drives don't need OS support.

http://www.tfot.info/content/view/83/59/

That was from Samsung so it's as official as you can get. If HHDs don't need OS support then they would automatically work with XP. That they only work with Vista, means OS support is required. (I don't think they truly meant Vista exclusive, just that Vista is the only OS with confirmed support right now).

 

I agree there's some truth to that - Vista is optimized for making effective use of the NAND - but just like cache, it will benefit other operating systems as well, perhaps not to the same extent. Of course Samsung's going to tout Microsoft's line. They want you to move over to Vista ASAP.

EDIT: I guess we'll just have to wait and see. To be honest, I'm not entirely certain of the implementation of the NAND on board the hard drive. From what I'm reading now, it seems like the NAND functionality is completely tied in with Vista's ReadyBoost software, which would make sense if they're saying Vista's the only OS that supports it.

Here's to hoping it'll be just like a larger cache buffer even without OS support.