Santa Rosa on an ultraportable.

Hi all,

I'm confused about an issue. I debating bying the Sony Vaio TZ now or wait the next upgrade?
Rumors say that Sony they will include the Santa Rosa chipset and the X3100 graphic card. Generally this upgrade will benefit the TZ or will discrease the battery life and produce more heat? I read a lot of different opinions, so if you can to make some clearness on this.

Santa Rosa: What about it? Would it make any difference for an "light" user (Word, and other "light" programmes)? How would battery time and fan noise be affected by Santa Rosa on an ultraportable? Are there other aspects of importance for an average user? And at last but not least: When will Santa Rosa be included in the TZ format, given its demands, voltage and so forth?

Thanks to mandersen .

 

What are the benefits of a newer chipset? The X3100 offers faster graphics and limited 3D gaming capability but with increased power drain. Otherwise the 945GM can handle Vista (without the eye candy) and is OK for 2D applications. Santa Rosa can provide other CPU-related enhancements such as the FSB switching and dynamic acceleration, but these are for the normal CPUs.

Perhaps the real question is whether Intel is planning to bring out a lower power version of the 965GM chipset to be the updated equivalent of the 945GMS chipset. Ideally it would offer better performance than the old chipset when on mains power but with no increased power drain when running on battery. The other need is to have some faster U series CPUs, even if they switch down to a lower speed and lower power mode when running on battery. Perhaps a significantly faster dual core CPU where one core can be completely switched off to save power when battery life if the objective. At the moment it seems that more powerful chips with more transistors leak more power and there needs to be the equivalent of pulling the mains plug rather than bits of the chips going into a low power state.

At the moment I don't see such products on Intel's site but sometimes we find the products reach the shelves before the datasheets get posted.

In the short term it is going to be difficult to get new hardware which matches the low power consumption of the 945GMS + U series CPUs so the risk is that better performance will come at the expense of battery life.

John

 

The Asus U1E is an 11.1" notebook like the TZ thats just been updated to Santa Rosa, X3100, 965 chipset. Unfortunately, there is little to no news on it right now, I would like to see how it compares to the previous Napa U1F model in performance, battery life, etc.