Brian's Brain

Rarely does the production ramp of a humble PC core logic chipset engender a glitzy unveiling event in downtown San Francisco. But, when you've got Intel's PR budget, and the chipset is the cornerstone of the latest iteration of the Centrino brand you've been cultivating with buckets of cash for almost five years to date....you think different*. Especially when the portable computer market represented by that brand is increasingly becoming the dominant driver of your business aspirations.

So it was that I found myself earlier today sitting in the Old Federal Reserve Building, surrounded by a few dozen demonstration laptops, a few dozen other journalists, more than a few dozen Intel employees, and being entertained and (sorta) informed by the predictably unpredictable (and always funny) Mooly Eden. Santa Rosa (aka Centrino Duo) is the fourth generation of the Centrino platform concept (the already-updated Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the brand's evolution), and in a sense there was nothing particularly new in today's unveiling. After all, Intel first announced Santa Rosa at the Spring 2006 Intel Developer Forum, and the company has made iterative proclamations since then.

Today's event, however, was the culmination of the rollout, with pending production and a steep predicted volume ramp-up. Why is Intel so fixated on mobile PCs? Statistics suggest, according to Eden, that notebooks will comprise 36% of the world computer market this year and will break through the 50% threshold by 2010. In fact, it's already the case that notebook PCs sell at a greater-than-50% clip in the U.S. retail market (which excludes, among other things, desktop-centric corporate PC sales). And Intel and its OEM partners seem well prepared to ramrod Santa Rosa into that market, with more than 230 system SKUs poised to go into production "in the near future," (including desktop systems from long-time mini-PC and home theater PC pioneers such as AOpen and Niveus), more than 100 of them dubbed "time-to-market" (i.e. on store shelves in the next 1-2 weeks) by Eden.

Santa Rosa consists of a number of silicon building blocks, the first three required in order for OEMs to receive permission to market the Centrino brand (and obtain Centrino branding funds!), with two others optional. First there's the Core 2 CPU, now in an 800 MHz frontside bus variant. Then there's the 965GM chipset itself, also (of course) 800 MHz FSB-capable and with a beefed up GMA X3100 graphics-and-video subsystem. Third in line is the 4965AGN Draft 802.11n wireless module, which Intel simplistically trumpets as having "5x the speed" and "2x the range" of 802.11a and 802.11g. And bringing up the rear are the optional bits; Intel Turbo Memory (the NAND flash memory-based modules formerly known as Robson Technology) in 512 MByte and 1 GByte flavours, and Active Management Technology, the enterprise-tuned Centrino Pro equivalent to Intel's desktop vPro initiative.

So how much faster are Santa Rosa systems than their Napa predecessors, and versus even earlier Centrino iterations? "The devil's in the details," so the saying goes, and here's where Eden's pitch got a little too rich. He showed a series of graphs comparing three systems based on the following IC sets:

• Pentium M 750 (single-core) CPU and 915GM chipset
• Core Duo T2400 and 945GM
• Core 2 Duo T7700 and 965GM

running a suite of synthetic (SPEC) and real-life benchmarks. To make my point, I'll focus on the SPECint stats. First off, Eden showcased their 'rate' versions, which (as I've pointed out before) naturally favour multi-core systems. Had there therefore not been a 2x multiplier in going from the Pentium M 750 (1.86 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 2 MBytes L2 cache) to the Core Duo T2400 (1.83 GHz, 667MHz FSB, 2 MBytes shared L2 cache), I would have been surprised.

Continue reading with 'Santa Rosa: Spec Specifics, And Graphics, Video and Communications Plans'....

*Speaking of which, Apple laptops were notably absent from the suite of systems on display at the press event....