Intel Santa Rosa Launch Event

Last week at a small event at Milk Studios in New York City, we had a chance to meet with representatives from Intel to talk about their recently launched "Santa Rosa" mobile platform and get some hands on experience with a number of notebooks and small form factor systems based on the technology.  If you're unfamiliar with the codename "Santa Rosa" it was basically an internal name given to the latest version of Intel's Centrino mobile platform that encompasses not only the processor, but the core logic chipset, and wireless network controller as well.

The latest Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro platforms consists of mobile Core 2 Duo processors, the mobile 965 Express chipset family with Intel Clear Video Technology, and Intel's next-gen Wireless-N 802.11AGN WLAN.  In addition to these three items, Intel Turbo Memory, which works in conjunction with Windows ReadyBoost feature to speed boot and application load times is also an optional feature.  And Centrino Pro adds support for Intel's vPro and Active Management Technologies as well.  This release on Intel's website does a good job of summarizing the new features and benefits of their latest mobile platform as whole.

While at the event we got to play around with small form factor systems based on the Santa Rosa platform as well as notebooks from virtually all of the major players, like HP, Sony, Toshiba, and Lenovo.  In all Intel has already announced 230 designs based on the Santa Rosa platform and more are sure to follow.