After weeks of leaked specs and images, Intel has finally launched its Santa Rosa notebook platform, which it has baptized with the same name as the Napa and Napa refresh platforms-Centrino Duo. The fresh platform brings new mobile Core 2 Duo T7100, T7300, T7500, and T7700 processors with 800MHz front-side bus speeds (up from 667MHz on previous chips) and clock speeds of up to 2.4GHz. It also introduces new 965 Express mobile chipsets with GMA X3100 integrated graphics, support for 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a new Turbo Memory flash caching feature. Turbo Memory allows systems to use either 512MB or 1GB of NAND flash memory as cache in order to improve storage performance and increase battery life. Intel claims that Turbo Memory can double performance when loading "frequently used applications" and reduce boot times by up to 20% in Windows Vista. Notebooks based on the new Centrino Duo platform are already coming out, but according to a PC World report quoted by Yahoo News, only a few vendors are launching machines immediately (Lenovo, HP, Asus)

In notebook related news, Nvidia today introduced a whole lineup of mobile graphics processors based on the same architecture as its desktop GeForce 8-series GPUs. The mobile GPUs are part of new GeForce 8600M and GeForce 8400M lines. The new GeForce 8M Series notebook GPUs -- the world's first to support DirectX 10 and fully accelerate decoding of H.264 full HD movies -- are available now from the top PC makers such as HP, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, and ASUS. (thanks TechReport)