The Centrino platform for laptops, named Santa Rosa, was launched in the first half of 2007 and is based on Merom technology, the first mobile chip developed under Intel’s new architecture.
Merom is expected to debut in the third quarter of this year and is part of the Napa platform—Centrino’s third generation. Napa (also known as Centrino Duo) officially appeared earlier this month, alongside the dual-core Core Duo processor. At launch, the Merom chip will maintain the 667 MHz speed from Napa, but in Santa Rosa, the Front Side Bus (FSB) increases to 800 MHz. Merom features a 4 MB L2 cache, whereas the Core Duo has a 2 MB cache.
Santa Rosa will include Crestine, the next product in the mobile chipset family, which includes the Express 945GM and 945PM chipsets (both part of Napa). Additionally, it will feature Kedron, Intel’s next-generation WLAN chipset.
Meanwhile, Intel is also preparing to launch two 65 nm Celeron D chips for desktops, designated 352 and 356. Based on Cedar Mill technology (the single-core 65 nm chip line), the new Celerons will come equipped with a 512 MB L2 cache, double that of the current Celeron D line. However, similar to the Celeron D, both new models will operate at an FSB speed of 533 MHz and will support 64-bit computing.
The Celeron processors will launch around the same time as the 671 processing unit (a Pentium 4 chip from Cedar Mill) in the second quarter of this year, clocking in at 3.8 GHz, similar to the 670 and 672 based on Prescott. The 671 will support Hyper-Threading (HT) but will not feature virtualization technology like the 672.
