45-nm Core 2 Duo
The Santa Rosa refresh comes in January, when Intel refreshes its current notebook technology. The current Centrino is known as Santa Rosa. Later in 2008 Intel will introduce a new Centrino called Montevina.
The most important component of the Santa Rosa refresh will be the CPU.
Amongst other things, the CPU is manufactured on a new process technology called high-k/metal gate (HKMG) that replaces key parts of the transistors with new materials. The upshot is that the transistors leak much less electrical current, which means that they don’t get nearly as hot if clocked at or near the same speeds. Alternatively you can ratchet up the clock for additional performance while generating the same amount of heat as previous chips.
The microarchitecture builds upon that of the previous CPU, the Core microarchitecture.
The new microarchitecture can do more work with each passing clock cycle, which increases performance. At the same time, the processors do not use additional power consumption to do this additional work.
A couple of improvements to the microarchitecture primarily impact multimedia and video processing.
A larger cache helps most applications a little.
The mobile version of this processor has additional power-management techniques built in.
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