Filed under: Hardware, Mac mini, Macbook Pro, MacBook
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
valthewu said 8:26AM on 5-10-2007
they will come on june 11th.
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Kevin Little said 8:34AM on 5-10-2007
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
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uicandrew said 1:54PM on 5-10-2007
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.
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Steve said 10:42AM on 5-10-2007
Are they socket compatible with the older Core Duo/Core 2 Duos?
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Leonard Nimrod said 12:10PM on 5-11-2007
These use a different socket. Not compatible with current Merom chips.
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artifex said 3:57PM on 5-10-2007
Hooray for Socket P and 800MHz FSB! I toldja this was coming...
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Umgawa said 5:51PM on 5-10-2007
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).
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