Intel Santa Rosa Centrino to be available in May

If everything goes as planned the new Santa Rosa mobile platform from Intel should be available in the first two weeks of May.

The new Centrino platform features 64-bit Core 2 Duo Merom processors, the mobile 965 Express series Crestline chipset and the Intel WiFi Link 4965AGN Kedron wireless module. Optional features include the Intel Turbo Memory (Robson cache technology), WWAN and WiMAX.

The upcoming Santa Rosa release in May will cover both the consumer and commercial sectors, and be equipped with the Core 2 Duo processor, according to DRAMeXchange. For consumer models, they will essentially target the mid to high-end market, where they will mostly be installed with Vista. On the other hand, the commercial models will encompass all segments. However, the Vista bundle rate on commercial models will not be too high in the beginning. For the value consumer market, the launch of Intel's 64-bit single-core CPU in third quarter 2007 should better accommodate the demand. By that time, the consumer Santa Rosa notebooks should reach a new shipment peak.

As the notebook industry is already mature, the release of Santa Rosa is unlikely to bring forth explosive growth. However, the new features should create new business opportunities for related component manufacturers. Due to objective conditions and cost issues, some of the new features in the first batch of Santa Rosa notebooks will not be highly bundled.