Santa Rosa: Crave goes hands on with the new Centrino

Core performance
Santa Rosa laptops will feature a series of all-new CPUs, which are designed to run faster than their predecessors. Like the older model, the new chips will (initially) be dual-core and feature 4MB of on-die cache, but while the old models utilised a front-side bus speed of 667MHz, the new chips have an FSB speed of 800MHz. The faster the FSB, the faster the processor can shuttle data to and from the memory subsystem.

Obviously, cranking up the FSB will have a detrimental impact on battery life -- which is completely against the Centrino philosophy. To mitigate this, Intel has added dynamic FSB switching, so it can throttle back to a lower frequency when running light tasks like playing a DVD or music.

Better still is the new Dynamic Acceleration. This enables single-threaded applications (those that don't take advantage of both cores in a dual-core CPU) to run more efficiently. Santa Rosa can shut down the inactive core and increase the clock speed on the active core in order to boost performance and save battery power.

Intel will also introduce a feature called Turbo Memory, which is designed to speed up boot times and application responsiveness. This is essentially a piece of NAND memory (either 512MB or 1GB in size) mounted directly into the motherboard, or into a special slot should the laptop manufacturer choose. It works in a similar manner to Vista's ReadyBoost, but is faster because data transfer speeds aren't limited to USB's maximum of 480Mbps. Plus, unlike ReadyBoost, it can be used outside of Windows, so it can speed up boot times, plus it doesn't have to waste valuable juice powering a USB device.

Crave's test results
The 2.2GHz Intel T7500 Core 2 Duo chip in our Santa Rosa laptop, paired with 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, helped our Santa Rosa sample achieve a PCMark 2005 score of 4,312. It's not exactly mind-boggling, but it's very solid and with time, we expect to see laptops achieving higher scores than this. For reference, the Dell XPS M2010 scored 4,112 with a 2GHz CPU, and Alienware's AMD Turion 64 Mobile ML40-equipped m9700 laptop scored 3,441.