A Santa Rosa Topic.

So ... what do we know about it?
It's better then merom? It's used with merom? Is it something you can upgrade yourself? Let's just keep this topic updated with general Santa Rosa information for the masses.

 

I don't know alot about it, but I will share what I do know. It is a new chipset/chip so no, not pin-compatible with yonah/merom. For these reason you will not be able to upgrade. Supposedly it will have an 800MHz FSB.

 

theres many threads on this topic. use the search tab.

 

Yes. Search is your friend.
Vespoli is mostly right. It won't run with the current Yonah/Merom chips in their current pin configurations, but it is designed specifically for the Merom core, and there will be new Core 2 Duo chips out to match the Santa Rosa platform.

 

I DID do a search, and didn't find anything dedicated to providing Santa Rosa information specifically. People mention they want to wait for it, there's one comparison topic, there's a news report ... nothing specifically for the Santa Rosa. Hence, the topic.

 

if theres a santa rosa discussion, i'm there, don't forget the new wireless card too. A/B/G/N capable and using wimax as well. I wonder what GPUs will come with santa rosa debut notebooks.

 

The chipset will also feature built in flash memory to take advantage of Vista's "Superfetch" feature.

 

"Superfetch"?

 

A large on-chipset cache to help speed up repeated hard-disk accesses by putting the data in faster NAND memory, rather than having to spin up the hard drive all the time.

 

So if you can replace the entire processor, you can put in the Santa Rosa yourself ...

 

No. You'd have to replace the entire motherboard. The whole system, essentially. A processor just plugs into a socket on the motherboard. There will be a completely different socket used for Santa Rosa based machines. The processors will be Merom processors, but you can't use the Merom's currently out in a Santa Rosa machine. There will be a completely different set of models they'll release, like the T7500 (which will be the 2.20GHz, 800MHz FSB part, versus my T7400, which is a 2.16GHz, 666MHz FSB part)

See this chart for a bit more info on how things will break down. The processors with the 800MHz FSB will be Santa Rosa only, and the others are whatever the current chipset is (brain is farting... sorry). So they're incompatible. If you want Santa Rosa, you'll need to get a completely new laptop.

Edit: NAPA. That's what the current platform is. Teaches me to read

 

Might actually be worth it to wait then ...

 

There are some pretty insistent rumors that its onboard GPU is hopelessly buggy and performs terribly when it works at all.

The motherboard itself (with or without GPU) is also supposed to use roughly twice as much power as current ones.

The above are just rumors though. I don't know if they're accurate, it's just something I've seen pop up more than a few times.

 

Ive never heard that rumour before , Everything Ive heard says that it uses alot less power that the current motherboards, Its also going to be Pre N not 802.11n though with Intel mass producing it the 802.11 board will probally certify whatever design intel choose to go with. I wonder if it will suport PCI Express v2.0? That would be pretty cool.

 

draft N? that stinks, i hope it doesn't come out pre n

 

"Everything Ive heard says that it uses alot less power that the current motherboards,"
Are we talking efficiency?
It's a more powerful motherboard, but it takes far less power to accomplish typical tasks than current motherboard?

 

isn't the main power saving feature that hybridized NAND RAM? Or is that merely for faster allocation of memory?

 

As technology progresses manufacturers find ways to lower power consumption while still improving performance. With processors this usually comes from a die shrinkage. For example Merom is faster than Yonah and it is 65nm instead of 90nm. The same thing goes for video cards. The 7900 GTX competes against the X1900 XTX and while the X1900 XTX is usually a little faster the 7900 GTX does usually keep up and uses quite a bit less power. It all comes down the design, the manufacturing process, ect.

 

counter example: Pentium 4. They increased power consumption and trashed performance. Don't trust that Santa Rosa won't do the same until it's been released.