Intel releases Santa Rosa notebook chipset

Our sister blog Engadget has the goods on Intel's newest notebook chipset which was released yesterday and is called "Santa Rosa." This chipset is the followup to earlier notebook chipsets which are presently powering the MacBook and MacBook Pro. This presumably means new and faster Mac portables sometime down the road. However, given that there was a delay of a couple of months between the first Windows PCs with the "Merom" Core 2 Duo and the first MacBook Pros sporting that processor, this doesn't mean that there will be new Macs in the immediate future. Whenever they do drop expect the top of the line to increase to 2.4 GHz (though it will remain a Merom Core 2 Duo chip), with front side bus speed increasing to 800 MHz over the 667 MHz of today. There's also a more powerful Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip, which should definitely help performance on a new MacBook or Mac mini. The chipset also supports more wireless networking standards, but of course there's no guarantee that Apple will use them.
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