Merom -> Penryn

I read somewhere about some new fast Intel chips and they apparently are called Penryns. The question I have is will it be possible to upgrade to these processors from Meroms? I'm considering getting a notebook with a cheap Merom and then upgrading later to save some money. Would this work?

 

Well I thought that Penryn was the succesor of Santa Rosa (but again, Santa Rosa is the name of the platform). So you are probaly right about that.

I am afraid upgrading is not possible. For example: the Crestline chipset is new and has a different socket then Merom has.

 

No. Penryn will not be pin-compatible with current Merom's, and even newer Merom's that work with Santa Rosa will be a different layout and incompatible with current systems. Upgrading CPU's is very, very rarely worth the money until the entire machine is obsolete. Get the best price/performance CPU you can afford when you get the laptop in the first place.

 

Pitabred is correct. Penryn will be the processor found in the Montevina platfrom, the sucessor to Santa Rosa. As a result, it will not be compatible with the new Socket P, that the Core 2 Duo will use with Santa Rosa. On the most part, processor upgrades don't help most of the users, unless a real change happens, like the addition of more cores. That won't b the case with Penryn, and so it leaves little reason to upgrade anyway. I agree with Pitabred that you should consider the best price to performance ratio processor.