Intel Santa Rosa Centrino platform to have 800MHz FSB

In the first half of next year Intel's upcoming Santa Rosa Centrino platform will take the hardware's FSB to 800MHz, The Register reports. Currently the new Napa Centrino platform and the Core Duo processors run at a 667MHz FSB.

Santa Rosa will be based on the Merom mobile CPU, which will be Intel's first mobile 64-bit processor.

Merom is due to ship this year, in the Q3 timeframe, within 'Napa', the third incarnation of Centrino. Napa was formally launched at the start of the month alongside Intel's Core Duo dual-core processor. At launch, Merom will maintain Napa's 667MHz frontside bus speed, but come Santa Rosa, the FSB clock will be upped to 800MHz. Merom will provide 4MB of L2 cache, up from Core Duo's 2MB.

The Santa Rosa Centrino platform will feature Crestine, the successor to the current Express 945GM and 945PM mobile chipsets along with Kedron, the next-generation WLAN chipset from Intel which will likely feature WiMAX and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The Crestine chipset will also feature a new graphics core, one with support for DirectX 10.