Intel's next-gen mobile platform "Santa Rosa" up and running

Various industry sources have confirmed to TG Daily that Intel's Santa Rosa platform, scheduled for a Q2 2007 release, has become available in limited numbers for testing. Santa Rosa will follow "Napa64," which will be launched with the Core 2 Duo 7000 series in Q3 of this year, and include the new ICH8 southbridge will support a BIOS stored in NAND flash, and remove legacy support for AC'97 and the PATA interface in notebooks.

Santa Rosa will be based on the Core 2 Duo 7000 as well as the "Crestline" chipset and the "Kedron" Wi-Fi component. The platform will also introduce "Robson" flash cache, which promises to accelerate boot times of computers by as much as 50% and decrease the power consumption of storage devices at the same time. The Santa Rosa platforms currently in testing include 2.2 GHz processors in an mPGA-479M package running on FSB800 (the first generation of Core 2 Duo 7000s and Napa64 will be running on FSB667.)