Santa Rosa and DX10 Question

Hi I'm a noob to the lap top market. Can anyone tell me when the DX10 capable laptops called "Santa Rosa" will be avaliable.

Thanks

 

Santa Rosa is the code name for the Intel Chipset supporting Wireless N; direct X10 and new CPU's(800mhz FSB comparied to 667mhz)

Direct X10 is just a Gaphic's card communication standard(rather than direct core instructions)

I say the first high end ones would be as early as Q3 2007 I think, not sure when ATI and Nvida are going to get there laptop DX10 stuff out.

correct me if I am wrong.

 

Sometime in mid-late May, but you're probebly looking at late May/early June before laptops are actually made with those components.

Santa Rosa's coming out in min May (the 14'th or something), and Nvidias releaseing their DX10 cards then too. But you're looking at a couple weeks before places like Dell will actually have the laptops ready to ship with the new stuff.

 

If Nvidia is launching DX10 as the same time, it will only take a few weeks for the XPS machines from Dell to use them, eventually it will trick down until it replaces DX9

 

Last I heard Santa Rosa was going to be released on may 8th. Nvidia has stated that they will release at the same time.

 

I'm planning to buy a notebook now. But do you all think i should wait or buy now?

 

If you can wait it is worth waiting for since there are many little improvments.

If you need it now then the laptops currently sold are pretty good and Santa-Rosa is not a huge step forward or a must have.

 

Here are the key improvements:

- FSB 667->800
- Better powersaving features
- Dynamic FSB 400<->800 for powersaving
- Intel Dynamic Acceleration IDA
- DX10 Crestline chipset: integrated X3100 DX10, or example Nvidia 86M/84M DX10 GPU
- Wifi 802.11n 4xfaster ~200Mbit wireless
- 512Mb/1024MB NAND Flash accelerator (powersaving 0.4W, 20% faster boot, 2x faster program loading etc.)
- BIOS->EFI

The IDA probably sounds most intriguing technology of them:

"Dynamic Acceleration takes the model a step further by balancing the allocation of resource even more carefully. When a Santa Rosa platform is executing a single threaded application it will actually switch off one of the CPU cores, thus eliminating wasted cycles. But the innovation doesn’t stop there, once the second core is idle, the clock speed on the active core will be increased to improve performance. Intel has also been very careful not to affect the TDP envelope, so increasing the frequency on the active core will produce the same amount of heat as if both cores were running at the standard clock."

 

Wifi 802.11n is not part of Santa Rosa anymore.

 

Nice improvement on paper. The real power is yet to see. I really hope that it's worth the price and wait.

 

Yes it is, Nokia HSDPA option isn't anymore.