MacBook Pro knows the way to Santa Rosa

Macworld release :

A little less than a month ago, Intel summoned the high-tech press to San Francisco so that it could unveil its brand-new “Santa Rosa” upgrade to its Centrino chipset. The new chipset included, among other things, a faster frontside bus and support for 802.11n wireless networking. These improvements so moved me that, in this very space, I predicted the Santa Rosa chips would find their way into Apple’s laptop line. “A matter of when, not if,” I said. A virtual certainty, I told everyone within earshot.

So not even a week after Intel’s Santa Rosa event, Apple rolled out updated MacBooks. And, of course, these upgraded machines were completely, visibly, and entirely Santa Rosa-free. I happened to be on a beach in Kauai when I heard the news, so that took a little bit of the sting about being so publicly wrong, just in case you were worried about my self-esteem in any manner.

Now Apple had its reasons for excluding any Santa Rosa-based improvements from the MacBook upgrade. “We decided with this update that we would add more value with processor speeds, RAM and hard drive space,” Apple director of portables product marketing Todd Benjamin told Macworld at the time. And indeed, our benchmarks revealed that bumping up the processor speed, increasing the hard-drive capacity, and—in the case of the low-end MacBook, at least—elevating the amount of shared L2 cache produced a noticeable performance jump from the previous round of Core 2 Duo-based MacBooks. Even more impressively, the black 2.16GHz MacBook even out-performed a 2.33GHz MacBook Pro in a couple of our tests.

Perhaps that’s why when it came time to upgrade the MacBook Pro line, Apple did go the Santa Rosa route, finally validating my 27-day-old prediction that such a move was imminent. The MacBook Pro updates announced Tuesday feature faster CPUs, greater memory capacity, and improved graphics performance.


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