What is Santa Rosa?

I keep hearing all this stuff about Santa Rosa but what actually is it???

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino#Santa_Rosa_platform_.282007.29

 

Santa Rosa is Intel's new Centrino platform. The new Centrino Duo platform has the previous generation's processor, but with a larger FSB at 800 MHz. Merom was largely FSB limited, so Intel decided to give it a larger FSB to increase performance somewhat. A new chipset is also included, which is supposed to help reduce power consumption, but nothing special has yet been seen. Have a look at the wikipedia article that Freelancer332 has psted. Alot more details can be found on there.

 

What's the point in having an 800Mhz FSB if the platfrom only supports DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 RAM?

Does that new FSB really make that much of a difference, if you can't use 800Mhz when it comes out.

 

It does make some difference, because even 533 MHz and 667 MHz RAM can give enough bandwidth to the processor for it to do its job faster. The same thing was true for the previos C entrino platfomr, where it was argued that slower 533 MHz, wasn't enough for the 667 MHz FSB.

 

Ahh right thanks for this. What's and FSB? Yes, I know I'm a noob. I've had exams all day so my brain isn't working properly. Thanks.

 

FSB- Front Side Bus. The frequency at which data is transferred from the RAM to the on-die cache (The processor, to put it simply).

 

Ram speed and fsb are not the same thing, so they do not have to match in order for things to work. And yes, the 800MHz does make a difference, but not something that people can see.

Also, noone said that you cant use the 800MHz fsb with 667MHz ram, so where did you get the idea that you cant use it? Did you really think that Intel did all that work to make the fsb 800 only to not make it work with 667 ram?

cpu fsb is quad pumped, so 200 actual speed * 4 = the 800MHz you see
ram speed is double pumped, so 333 actual speed * 2 = the 667MHz you see

So because of this, the fsb of the cpu is well under the speed of the ram, so it's not being slowed down and not utilzed.

 

It was on the wikipedia link

 

800FSB is pretty useless because now the RAM is still limiting in bandwidth. When they come out with 800mhz DDR2 and assuming the chipset will run it then it'll be useful.

 

Its slightly different. Because the FSB is quadpumped, its effective data transfer is 800 MHz. Since the RAM is DDR, its effective is 533/667 MHz. Its not the actual clock which is a quarter and a half of the FSB and RAM. The reason why this RAM can still work effectively is because the bandwidth of DDR2 RAM in dual channel is still high enough to feed the maximum of 6.4 GB/s (800 MHz FSB) the processor could want. Granted, that one module of either 533 MHz or 667 MHz, is not enough for the 800 MHz FSB.

But, the fact remains, that most users will not notice the performance difference, because the processor never really reaches a point where it requires alot of information sahring through the FSB.

 

Things have definitely changed since the days of Athlon XP and DDR, as the ram speed and fsb were always running in harmony.....ie. AXP 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB (200x2) on DDR400 (@200MHz). I've gotten confused with DDR2 and HyperTransport ever since. lol