New Intel mobile platform slated for first-half of 2007

Intel's "Santa Rosa" notebook platform will hit the streets in the first half of 2007, bringing improvements in processing power, battery life and wireless connectivity over the current Centrino architecture.

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Intel has enjoyed strong sales with Centrino, which combines a low-wattage processor and wireless ability with an efficient chipset. Now the company will upgrade those ingredients to a more efficient version of the "Merom" Core 2 Duo chip and "Crestline" ICH8M chipset, together code-named Santa Rosa.

The company will also make the Santa Rosa notebooks start up faster by augmenting current memory technology with a NAND flash-based disk cache, said Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group, at Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday. Compared with a Centrino PC, that "Robson" technology will allow future notebooks to load applications twice as fast and wake up from a hibernation state twice as fast.

For wireless connectivity, the new notebooks will use the pending 802.11n standard, capable of streaming data at 300M bits per second (bps), five times faster than the current 802.11g, Perlmutter said Wednesday.

In a demonstration, he played high-definition segments of a film called "Spoon" on a Santa Rosa platform running Microsoft Corp.'s Vista OS. That level of broadband connectivity will also allow Intel to extend its new vPro business bundle to notebooks, after having launched it for desktops on Sept. 7.

"But the jewel of the crown for wireless connectivity is WiMax," Perlmutter said. Intel plans to deliver an integrated Wi-Fi and WiMax chip by 2008. WiMax is a metropolitan-area wireless technology designed to deliver at least 1M bps of data and in some cases much more. The company's WiMax plan will be supported by a commitment from service providers Sprint Corp. and Clearwire Corp. to start building mobile WiMax networks in 2007 and provide commercial service by 2008.

Intel also said it would extend WiMax support to future reference designs for the handheld Ultramobile PC (UMPC) platform, including a 2.5-pound version for students up to university age.

Intel also expects vendors to begin selling a low-cost "Classmate" notebook in developing nations in the first quarter of 2007, according to spokesman Larry Carr.