Quote:
Originally Posted by nighthawkx
doesn't Santa Rosa user DDRIII? I thought that wasn't going to be commercially available for a few more quarters. Or does santa rosa have a separate northbridge for DDRII?
Overall good advice though, newer chipsets are always a good thing. I kind of wish I had waited for 650i instead of going with 975X
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Santa Rosa uses DDRII, but now up to 800mhz. The FSB of the CPU has been increased from 667mhz to 800mhz, with a new socket type (hopefully with a change in the actual bus speed before the multiplication). Santa Rosa's Wireless Networking card is Draft-N, and the integrated GPU is DX10 compatible, which, while not good for gaming, is probably a could thing for a lot of every day uses as well. Santa Rosa also has a hybrid hard drive, part flash, for speed and battery saving. It will also get rid of BIOS completely for the newer...whachamacalit, replacing it.
Energy saving Core 2 Duos will also be introduced with the chipset, as well as a C2Duo 7800, where the current highest model is the 7600 at 2.33Ghz.
Since supposedly the mobile Core 2 Duos are architecturally identical to their desktop cousins, yet bottle necked, I really wouldn't be surprised if we saw a nice leap in performance. That, or it could be another 10% change that we saw going from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo. But there are significantly more changes in Santa Rosa than there was in that simple CPU upgrade.