Centrino, Sonoma, Napa, Santa Rosa: Intel mobile platforms up to 2007

In one of our previous publications about the future generations of Intel Centrino we mentioned Napa platform to be released about the late 2005, when the company introduces the next generation of mobile processors cores, Yonah. Today the Japanese sources shed some more light on this. We got to know the name of the Napa successor — Santa Rosa — expected late in 2006 along with the first Merom cores.

Now some more information about Napa. According to the freshest data, 65nm Yonah core will be introduced in at least two modifications, single and dual-core. Respectively, each version will be positioned for different markets: the single-core (up to 45W TDP) — for light notebooks, while the dual-core (up to 90W TDP) — fpr DTR models. At that, they say that ULV (ultralow voltage) versions with about 5W power consumption will be made on the single-core variant only.

Napa, besides Yonah core, will be based on the Calistoga chipset being a mobile version of desktop Lakeport chipset expected in Q2 2005. Calistoga will be released in discrete and integrated fast GPU modifications. It will support DDR2-667 and Serial ATA-300, and will work with ICH7-M Southbridge. Napa will also include Gaston Mini PCI Express WLAN solution supporting IEEE802.11a/b/g standards and WPA2 encryption (the next generation, IEEE802.11n, is said to be announced later, in Q3 2005).

But what´s next? Next, closer to the end of 2006, we´ll see multi-core (2 and more) Merom processors with 4MB L2 cache alongside Santa Rosa platform. Not much is known about these, but Santa Rosa´s base chipset is named Crestine, and Intel Extreme Graphics3 will support DirectX 9. Perhaps, by that time the chipset will already support DDR2-800. But this is only a guess.

In other words, today we just added to the list of the future codenames that will obtain specs with time. And currently the Centrino timeline is like this:

Source: PC Watch

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