Today, Intel has announced the release of the latest revision of their Centrino mobile technology. Formerly codenamed “Santa Rosa”, several upgrades have been made available.
- The available processor speeds have been beefed up; now you can get a Core 2 Duo Mobile as fast as 2.4 GHz (model T7700). Also available are the 2.2 GHz T7500, the 2.0 GHz T7300, and the 1.8 GHz T7100. All of these processors except the T7100 have a 4MB L2 cache.
- Although the new CPUs are still based on a 65 nanometer process (still Merom), they do include new microarchitecture, such as a wider pipeline, better streaming instruction support, and Advanced Smart Cache, which is smarter than normal cache.
- Power management has also been improved, including the ability to totally disable one of the cores to save power, while at the same time boosting the speed of the core that is left running.
- FSB has been increased to 800 Mhz (from 667 MHz), supporting DDR2-800 memory. FSB speed can vary dynamically along with processor speed to save power.
- WiFi has been upgraded to include a/b/g/n
- Integrated video is powered by GMA X3100. Don’t get your hopes up though; it will still suck in video games.
- Robson Flash Memory is finally here (and is now known as Turbo Memory) – a NAND memory chip will store some information allowing a deeper hibernation mode to be used, even when power is completely cut off. While in Windows Vista, it can be used with ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive.
All in all, this is quite a nice leap considering that a huge revamp will be occurring soon when the 45nm Penryn platform is launched.
