Intel's Santa Rosa platform officially dubbed Centrino Pro

While the Mac faithful are still twiddling their thumbs waiting for Apple to finally bump those sexy MacBook Pros to Merom status, Intel's not wasting any time officially dubbing its next generation notebook platform. The company unveiled the Santa Rosa chipset, complete with integrated HSDPA, at this year's Intel Developer's Forum, but we've now learned that it will not only be built "around the 64-bit dual-core Merom" processor, but it'll carry a "Centrino Pro" nametag to boot. Although specific speeds weren't announced, the chip giant did say that next year's Core 2 Duo lineup would include "T7300, T7500 and T7700 models," which boast an "800MHz front side bus and 4MB L2 cache," while the low-end T7100 gets it on-die cache halved. Simultaneously, Intel's "GM965/PM965 chipsets and 82566MM Gigabit Network/Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN network chips" will be unveiled to complete the Centrino Pro trifecta. Intel's planning on having these expeditious goodies ready by "Q2 2007," and the $300 million its throwing down for "promotion purposes" should keep us all very informed on its progress.

[Via Laptoping]