Thinkpads Forum

I am looking into buying a new Laptop. Either a Z or a T with Core 2 Duo, and was wondering is any new processors will be coming soon from intel.

I know the core 2 duo was released for thinkpads last week, but what else is up and coming?

The Santa Rosa chipset platform is slated for a Q1/Q2 2007 release and includes the latest WiFi connectivity hardware from Intel and true support for 64-bit. The Core 2 Duos can have 64-bit OSes and applications because the CPU is 64-bit enabled, yet still have the initial memory constraints because the rest of the chipset doesn't quite support 64-bit yet.

The development on new processors is so fast that my Dothan is getting old compared to the Yonah & the Santa Rosa

Does anyone here in the forums own a Thinkpad with an AMD processor?

I've been hearing an awful lot about Napa not being "64-bit", but the truth is, it has full 64 bit support, other than that it cannot see more than 4gb of memory, which is not really applicable to the T60 at the moment.

If you happen to be of the opinion that it is not, please post links and references.

The big leap with Santa Rosa will be the embedded NAND flash memory. That should help performance quite a bit.

Current Core 2 Duo machines run 64-bit code, but can only address a maximum of 4GB *physical* address space. Can address as much virtual address space as paging disk space will allow. People have already reported running 64-bit Windows XP with Core 2 Duo processors.

Santa Rosa will also have a faster graphics processing unit which is especially relevant to the X60 line. It will also have wireless 802.11n, but you can buy that today with an Atheros mini-pci that is offered by Lenovo.

dfumento wrote:Current Core 2 Duo machines run 64-bit code, but can only address a maximum of 4GB *physical* address space. Can address as much virtual address space as paging disk space will allow.

And even though the addressable physical memory is limited to 4 GB, the important thing is that the full 4 GB is available to applications, unlike the 2/3 GB application memory limit with 32-bit Windows.

There are no Thinkpads that came from IBM with AMD processors out of the factory; there are, however, Thinkpads with Socket 7s that can accomodate a K6 AMD CPU; the 310EDs and 315s being a good examples of this.

Many 32-bit Intel processors could address more than 4GB of memory, as well, through Physical Address Extension support; the problem was that other parts of the system couldn't necessarily support as much as the CPU could. Similar to the situation with the Merom Core 2 Duo revisions now and the fact that the CPU is actually 64-bit itself, but the chipset altogether really isn't. Santa Rosa will fix that as well.

christopher_wolf wrote:Merom Core 2 Duo revisions now and the fact that the CPU is actually 64-bit itself, but the chipset altogether really isn't. Santa Rosa will fix that as well.

Even without Santa Rosa it is fully functional 64-bit, just cannot have more than 4GB physical address space (e.g. RAM) but plenty of virtual address space. Since there are only 2 RAM slots and 2GB parts are about $400-500 each, for all practical purposes this is sufficient for now even without Santa Rosa.

Yeah, but I am still waiting for Santa Rosa to iron even that out plus the "bonuses" that come with it.