X-bit labs

Santa Rosa + Vista: Three Notebooks Reviewed

Category: Mobile

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/04/2007 | 04:18 PM ]

We will take three mobile computers – Asus A8Sc, Toshiba Satellite A100-906 and Lenovo Thinkpad T61 - and will investigate the features and performance of mobile Santa Rosa platform in Windows Vista operating system.

Table of contents:

• Santa Rose In-Depth
  
• CPU
  
• Chipset
  
• Wireless-N
  
• Turbo Memory
  
• Centrino Pro
  
• What’s Next?
  
• Testing Participants
  
• Asus A8Sc
  
• Toshiba Satellite A100-906
  
• Lenovo Thinkpad T61
  
• Testing Participants Specifications
  
• New Technologies in Real Life
  
• Intel Turbo Memory
  
• Intel Dynamic Acceleration
  
• Performance
  
• Synthetic PCMark05 Benchmark
  
• General Performance
  
• Performance in Applications
  
• 3D Performance
  
• Battery Life
  
• Conclusion
  

Intel Company continues to push its mobile Centrino platform into the market. This platform has been almost completely renewed over the past couple years – now it includes totally different processors and chipsets, not the ones it first came out with. Nevertheless, the name remains unchanged. They have recently added a “Duo” word to the Centrino name that stands for dual-core processors.

However, Centrino Duo platform has also changed dramatically since day one. In fact, Intel is currently offering the third generation of this platform already that is known under Santa Rosa codename. The previous platforms were called Napa and Napa Refresh and we have already discussed them in great detail on our site before.

Santa Rosa platform appeared in the market before summer set in. However, we haven’t yet performed any in-depth performance analysis of this platform as we intended to wait for the full set of tests for Windows Vista to become available. The leading hardware and notebook manufacturers are already able to provide stable driver versions for Windows Vista and the corresponding benchmarks are already available, too. That is why today we are going to take a real close look at Intel Centrino Duo platform. However, before we get directly to the benchmarking session it would be really interesting to discuss the distinguishing features of contemporary Centrino Duo platform and it differences from Napa Refresh.

First of all I would like to say that Intel’s mobile platform concept includes a chipset, a CPU and a wireless network adapter. These three components in the new platform are all new as well, so let’s take a closer look at each of them separately.