The lowdown on Intel's 'Santa Rosa' Centrino

 

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By David Fearon

Posted on 8 May 2007 at 17:31

The Centrino mobile brand is one of Intel's major success stories, and it's had constant updates to keep pace with technology since its introduction in 2003. Here, we provide a rundown of its new features, and an exclusive preview of a laptop from Samsung.

This latest revision is one of the most comprehensive yet. As ever, the new Centrino - technically Centrino Duo with its dual-core processor - comprises three modules, all of which need to be present for a notebook to qualify for the official Centrino label.

The three modules in question are the processor, chipset and wireless module.

New processor
The new mobile versions of the Core 2 Duo processor receive a comprehensive set of tweaks, including Dynamic Acceleration and improved Front Side Bus speeds. Find out more here

Processor power management
Centrino's power management has been refined to keep increased clock speeds from pulling the processors over their thermal design power ratings. Read more about this here

Chipset changes
Centrino now moves up to the new Mobile 965 chipset. Find out what this means for the platform here

Wireless, graphics, Turbo Memory and the platform refresh
Santa Rosa heralds Centrino's move to 802.11n wireless - but you're not automatically guaranteed 802.11n speeds. Find out why here

Conclusion
While we're not bowled over by this release in the same way we were when the previous-generation Core and Core 2 Duo variants hit the ground at a dead-run, Santa Rosa is an impressive bundle of technologies.

To see how a production notebook, the Samsung SENS P55, performed in our tests, click here