Intel Santa Rosa - chipset changes

By David Fearon

Posted on 8 May 2007 at 17:42

Intel Santa Rosa - chipset changes

The old Centrino platform, codenamed Napa, was based on the Mobile 945 chipset family, which itself was a derivative of the last-but-one 945 Express desktop chipset. Centrino now moves up to the new Mobile 965 chipset, which includes the ICH8M south bridge chip for peripheral communication.

The ICH8M actually provides the most interesting enhancements, with 3Gb/sec SATA support and up to ten USB ports.

There's also an Enhanced version of the ICH8M to support wireless AMT (active management technology) under the newly announced Centrino Pro platform, and Intel's Matrix Storage RAID system, which allows mixed RAID0 and RAID1 partitions on a pair of drives.