Santa Rosa is no big deal...

This is being discussed in the Dell forums too but heres an excerpt from the latest Anandtech preview of Santa Rosa:



"Intel's Centrino platform has been the sum of a series of evolutionary steps, each building on a very solid foundation originally introduced in 2003. Each step along the way brought us new technologies, better performance, and longer battery life. Unfortunately, with such high expectations for constant improvements in performance and power efficiency, it's not too difficult to feel let down by Santa Rosa; there's simply no tangible performance improvement for the vast majority of applications. For the first Centrino platform with no major CPU enhancements, we have to look to the platform for the real attraction to Santa Rosa. "

They compared 2.4 Santa Rosa to 2.33 Napa...

Interesting, now I may be buying an XPS M2010 sooner than later!

Edit: Here is the skinny on Turbo Memory (Robson):

"
Not only did boot times not improve with our Santa Rosa test platform (sent to us by Intel), but enabling Intel Turbo Memory caused the system to take even longer to hibernate than with it disabled:"

It seems like poor implementation or it just doesn't do much in it's current state. I'm thinking it's implementation, and it should atleast help disk operations by even 5%..

 

I totally agree... The only good side of Santa Rosa is DirectX 10 support due to the nVidia 8600 or HD 2600 video cards.

The performance gain from Merom compared with Yonah was even bigger!

 

Yeap, besides the graphic card revisions and DX10(of which won't be used alot for at least a year), Santa Rosa isn't something big, yet.

 

Well Santa Rosa was not meant to be a big increase in performance. Intel has nothing to fear from AMD, and thus is very satisfied with its current performance. No need to rush penryn out the door if AMD is nowhere near close in performance.

Plus, like mentioned, SR was purely an update of the platform (n wirless, robson memory, dx10 gpus, new chipset) not an update on the cpu. They just bumped up the fsb slightly to open up the c2d's potential while not sacrificing much power draw.

 

Is Robinson part of Santa Rosa or is it separate? I'd like to see a boost in HD performance.

 

It's Robson... And if you are asking whether older platforms would integrate Robson, then no, they won't.
In any case, the wait for Santa Rosa was more about waiting for the dx10 GPUs.

 

According to the article, Robson's not workin well yet...

 

Yes, putting aside the little bonus in PCMark05, it's actually lowering the performance (of course for a price )

 

well then if thats the case i better get my G1 before G1s is a standard, i dont wanna pay more for less.

 

I have no doubt in my mind that whoever wrote the review will eat his words once a "pro" in the trade does the review right. I recall them doing a review on the last chipset upgrade and saying pretty much the same. Either them or cnet. This technology would not be made if it didnt work. Every single thing intel put out worked like a charm. Some people say that their claims of better battery life was not true. Well it wasnt. from the last chipset to the now (banias, dothan, yonah, napa) there wa sno improvement of battery life however their was an increase in performance and no reduction on battery life which in my book is better battery life.

 

I figure that by the time DX10 games (at least ones that I want to buy) becomes common, I'll be ready for my next laptop.

 

It's called embellishment. It sells laptops. There are new features and other bells and whistles, but it's not like the difference is going to be night and day. The time to market for most products is so fast that they are usually rushed out the door without all the parts 100% functional until later.

There's so many functional changes in Santa Rosa that it's:

a) not likely that all of them will be implemented by all manufacturers all at once (more likely in phases) since it's still a Centrino Duo if it has Intel CPU, Intel chipset, and Intel wireless and anything else is "extra" (see this table http://www.intel.com/products/centrino/compare.htm ),

b) not all of them are likely to be working at 100%. If there are any "mistakes" in the hardware which stop them from working will almost certainly will not be fixed for the people who bought it already), and

c) Robson technology uses flash RAM as "extra hard disk cache" but is clearly done at the OS level since it needs a driver to work. This article ( http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1936636,00.asp ) implies that Intel implements it as a PCI-E card. If that's the case, it can be easily installed via the ExpressCard slot on most laptops, so there isn't anything really "exclusive" about this technology to Santa Rosa.

If they're refreshing the models for Santa Rosa and there's DX10 cards, maybe it might be possible to get a DX10 card for the preceding model?

 

plus you can get a PCMCIA to express card adapter if you feel really left out... but i digress..
the only thing Santa Rosa gives is moving from the i945 to the i965 chipset, with support for a 800Mhz FSB, and a socket to support for possible quad core implementations of the mobile Core2Duo.
Given i already have a T7200, the cost involved isn't worth it for the performance gained for moving to a T7600. - £400GBP / $800USD for 333Mhz extra? no thanks. as the 2.4@800FSB doesn't give any performance increase to speak of, i'm not bothered by that either.
802.11n wireless is able to be retro fit to most modern laptops, and as no-one else seems to know, this weekend i'm gonna crack the case on my G1 to see if the GFX card is an MXM module. Maybe aiding the possible move to a GeForce M8600GT.
however, looking at the specs of the M8600GT, they arn't that much better than the go7600GT/go7700. sure you get unified 32 shaders in DX10 architecture, but the ram bandwidth seems to look to be about the same, so stuck with little or no FSAA to get playable frame rates (at 1680x1050 )
The RAM spec is the same too:- 533/667Mhz dual channel. I've maxed my G1 to 4Gb of 667 DDR2, so i'm happy with that aswell

just my 2pennyworth

 

Have you seen this demonstration of Intel Turbo Memory?

http://www.hexus.tv/show.php?show=78

 

Is it just me or does it appear that the laptop on the left (w/o ITM) is running about twice and a half as much system tray applications as the one on the right (w/ ITM)? Like, an antivirus doing a scan perhaps, or some download accelerator?

I find it hard to believe any single given piece of technology will improve computer performance by 130%...

Edit: Given this neat trick, how are we even sure the two computers are equipped with the exact type of hardware? The guy commenting can say anything he wants and we have to believe him...

 

also according to that article, if you read it, they mention that it could be a vendor specific problem. they were told by the vendor that the bios they had in their test rig just wasnt set up to make use of the "robson" ram.

why they would do that who knows, but from that i can take it that the technology does infact work, if implemented correctly and implementation is something the vendors like Asus, lenovo etc have to do , not intel.

 

ontop of that, wireless n isnt even finalized, its still in draft form...and the last few draft n router reviews i saw didnt look that amazing if im honest.

wireless b/g is pretty much perfect for most people, here in the UK at least there is no internet connection able to max that out (unless you can tap in to your schools 100mbit pipe)

unless your streaming HD content wirelessly or very large files....its just not going to be an issue for most people

 

yeah a) has already been confirmed with the first ASUS A series and sammy R series not coming with the robson memory at all

b) always the case, look at the 6800 graphics cards...purevideo processor they said...till it turned out all the AGP NV40 chips PVP's were simply broken beyond repair, especially software bandaids. they fixed it for the 6600GT and PCI-E variants though

in this case wireless n, isnt even final yet.....still draft

with the graphics cards, id imagine if its an MXM module then swapping them will be fine. id imagine the 8600 to be no more power needy than the 7700 it replaced. however, alot laptops have these things soldered directly to the mother board, that means your pretty much stuck.

 

Here is tgdaily's comments on this Turbo Memory demo:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31976/135/

It does sound like it may be mostly hype.

 

I really don't care much if Santa Rosa is this or that...

Show me real life performance on games like Crysis or Alan Wake (once they come out) or at least FSX Pro, and if framerates and image quality are great, then I'm sold...

Don't get me wrong, as a gamer, I do love my G1 a lot, but I can't wait to see real life performance of the G1S soon...