Intel To Release Next-Gen Laptop Platform In May?

If you're contemplating the purchase of a new laptop, you might want to hold out a bit longer if this report from Digitimes is correct. It seems that Intel, who already dominates the laptop arena, is planning on adding new features that will both enhance performance as well as increase battery life.

The Robson technology the article mentions is a flash memory socket or slot that will allow OSes such as Vista to improve hard disk performance and save electricity in the same way that hybrid drives work. This technology sounded really good a year ago, but recently there have been numerous hybrid and solid state disk (SSD) drive announcements from many key players in the storage arena, so the benefits may only be seen with the now "older" mechanical drives.

"According to the current product planning of vendors, if all goes as scheduled, Intel's next generation notebook platform, Santa Rosa, is set to hit product shelves in the first half of May, according to DRAMeXchange, which noted that from the timetable, both the shipments of full system and barebone notebooks will be a major focus of PC ODMs at the end of April. The major architecture of the Santa Rosa platform, as planned by Intel, is primarily equipped with the 64-bit Core 2 Duo (Merom) CPU, mobile 965 Express series (Crestline) chipset and Intel Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN (Kedron) wireless module. Optional features include Intel Turbo Memory (Robson), WWAN and WiMAX (Echo Peak) modules."