Intel releases Santa Rosa notebook chipset

The only thing that remotely excited me about this blurb was the notice of the GMA X3100 graphics chipset. While it's not necessarily the equivalent of a dedicated graphics card, as it will still inevitably share memory with the main RAM of the computer, it's still a giant step forward over the previous GMA chipsets, which could run video like a champ, but were effectively less than useless when it came to games that required transform & lighting effects.

With any luck, decent quality built-in 3D-acceleration such as this will be here to stay, as I've often felt that a lack of quality gaming hardware on the lower-end Macs has been as much to blame for not having any (boxed, non-downloadable, multi-million-dollar budget) games on the Mac as the propensity for developers to initially do their work in DirectX, making ports to the Mac lengthy, arduous tasks that inevitably earn the scoffing of your Windows-using friends who laugh and say, "You just got that game? I had that game two years ago! It's twenty bucks now for Windows!"

However, I still look forward to seeing Spore in 2012 (and on the Mac in 2016).

Hooray for Socket P and 800MHz FSB! I toldja this was coming...

These use a different socket. Not compatible with current Merom chips.

Are they socket compatible with the older Core Duo/Core 2 Duos?

well, santa rosa also adds support for the optional Robson cache or the hybrid harddrives with built-in flash. it would help boot up times, which is already very good for mac, but can be very long for pcs.

this should help battery life, along with the LED screens. otherwise, it seems like an incremental step up for macbook pros.

macbooks will benefit from the significantly improved integrated graphics, which supposedly can play games requiring 3-d graphics.

So... they keep claiming that every new Centrino chip is more powerful, yet for those of us who've used them they all seem to benchmark exactly the same.

http://www.ebizmba.com

they will come on june 11th.