Four of Intel’s mobile chipsets—including its most recent and well-known, Santa Rosa—have been Centrino as far as your mum is concerned. To help us keep things a little straighter and make it obvious they’re actually updating stuff, Intel’s upcoming Penryn-oriented mobile chipset, Montevina, which’ll be pushing Santa Rosa aside, will be branded Centrino 2. Thanks, Intel, for bringing just a little bit of logic to chip branding. Core 2 Duo is still a mouthful, though. [Digitimes]
Guess those rumours were true about impending MacBook updates. Apple didn’t make a big deal about it, but right under everyone’s noses the company’s upgraded its popular MacBook laptops, finally goosing them up to the Santa Rosa architecture with GMA X3100 integrated video, giving those graphics a sprightly new lease on life. Santa Rosa gives the MacBook a welcome speed bump, raising the front-side bus speed to 800MHz from 667MHz. Both the white and black MacBooks get the new chipset, and the MacBook Pro, already totin’ Santa Rosa, was also annointed with a new chip and drive choice. Let’s drill down for the details. More »
If Sony’s last crop of notebooks proved to be too rich for your blood, their new VAIO CR series might be what you’re looking for. For starters, they’re based on Intel’s Santa Rosa platform, so we’re talking the latest tech here. They have 14.1-inch (WXGA) screens, which means you won’t go blind trying to read text, but you also won’t break your back lugging the system back and forth. More »
Multitaskers rejoice, Intel is going to start using seperate decoders for HD DVD and Blu-ray playback in certain versions of their Santa Rosa chips. Now your pewny graphics card won’t have put up with your love of High-Def on its own.
That means no more computer slow down when you’re watching Planet Earth on Blu-ray (or HD DVD) and checking out Gizmodo at the same time. That’s a win for us, and a win for you-thanks Intel. – Ben Longo More »
At last, here are the new Santa Rosa-based Apple MacBook Pros, loaded with faster Core 2 Duo processors. Same design but with LED-backlit LCD screens, increased processor speeds, more memory and zoomtastic NVIDIA 8600M GT graphics at the same $1,999 and $2,499 prices. And all this shaving 0.4 pounds off its weight. Full specs and information about the also-revamped 17″ model, with optional 1,920 x 1,200 pixel screen, after the jump.
Fans of Dell’s M1210 (the fighting twelve incher) will be interested in this update to their gaming/business notebook. Our tipster tells us that Dell will put in the old Santa Rosa-style upgrade that we’ve been seeing all over the place lately, which gives the little guy a bit of a boost in performance to keep it up to date with other laptop lines.
In other non CPU news, the M1210 update will have a 8400M DX10 graphics card, LED backlighting, slot-loading DVD drive, and be 4 pounds and smaller/thinner than the previous M1210. The tipster got his or her hands on it recently and says it’s great, but going to be very pricey. – Jason Chen
Thanks tipster!
Have a butchers at Lenovo‘s newest ThinkPads, the T61 and the R61. While there’s nothing particularly scrummy about the design, the laptops do have Intel’s Santa Rosa platform under the hood. Both models will be available from next month, with updated versions following on in June (a WWAN model of the T61) and July (a Blu-Ray DVD burner on the R61). There’s even fingerprint technology on some of the T61s to keep your private stuff just that.
Both models have 14.1-inch displays, Intel Turbo memory card for some KITT-like Vista performance turbo-boost, hard disk encryption, SmartCard support and NVIDIA graphics. And if you were looking for the IBM badge, you can forget it: Lenovo has finally scratched it off – the first time they have done that since they bought the company’s PC division in 2005. All the new technology specs of both models after the jump, but no prices as yet.
