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Mar 20, 2007 08:56 GMT  ·  By

Intel is planning on releasing the fourth generation of Centrino notebook platform codenamed Santa Rosa. This is the next best thing Intel has to offer on the mobile computer market, and Santa Rosa is supposed to feature Intel's Core 2 Duo, Merom, processor, an 800MT/s front side bus with Dynamic Front Side Bus Switching, Intel Mobile 965 express chipset (Crestline) with GMA X3000 graphics accelerator, Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter (Kedron) and a NAND based cache memory called Turbo Memory (previously known as Robson).

The platform, also called Centrino Pro, and the next generation of Intel vPro technology, codenamed Weybridge, will add support for a variety of Microsoft System Center solutions including System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Ops Manager 2007) and System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE 2007). Intel's vPro technology, which includes Intel's Active Management Technology, will add support for the new Web Services Management (WS-MAN) standard.

"This announcement is great news for our mutual customers and partners. Through our partnership with Intel we are able to ensure customers who implement Intel Active Management technology-based systems are fully manageable by Microsoft's industry leading System Center solutions. Intel's leadership and support of WS-MAN ensure that the combination of our solutions enables customers to handle situations over a simple, low-cost connection that previously required a deskside visit or couldn't be done before. This combination of technologies raises manageability to a new level and significantly lowers the customers' overall cost of ownership", said Kirill Tatarinov, vice president, Microsoft Windows Enterprise Management Division.

What Intel's AMT technology allows is for a computer to self monitor itself and relay information to a centralized access point, thus simplifying the systems administrators' work. The information transmitted includes data about the general health of the computer system, allows for sending warning messages to the IT support when a computer error occurs, even when the operating system isn't able to boot, or it can allow for remote computer access, starting a computer even when it's closed, and it also prevents the sending or receiving of computer viruses to and from the network.

The partnership between Intel and Microsoft has brought the benefit of using a dedicated computer software for use with Intel's technologies. This simplifies the management and downtime experienced because of hardware of software crashes, and Microsoft's System Center solutions are currently being used by most of the Fortune 500 companies.

Intel's Santa Rosa Centrino platform is expected to be launched in the second quarter of this year, and the Weybridge Intel vPro technology in the second half.