The Intel Developers Forum, or IDF for short, gave Intel the possibility to make a number of announcements concerning its plans and roadmaps for the near future. While Intel is currently dominating to market for desktop central processing units, things are not so clear on the mobile market segment where Advanced Micro Device has an important market share. As Intel will soon launch its new generation of processing units based on the 45 nanometer fabrication process, the mobile computing platform from Intel is going to get a face lift.

The currently used Intel mobile computing platform, Santa Rosa, will soon sport a new name, the ''Santa Rosa Refresh'' and it will enjoy the addition of the Penryn class of processing units, all built using the 45 nanometer fabrication process. The new mobile processors from the Penryn family of products will be priced between $209 and $851 in 1000-unit tray quantities, so for that high price users should expect a serious performance boost.

Five new mobile processing units will be included in the new Santa Rosa Refresh, starting with the entry level T8100 processor that runs at 2.1GHzand continuing with the T8300 at 2.4Ghz, T9300 at 2.5Ghz, T9500 at 2.6Ghz and finally, the top of the line X9000 running at an impressive 2.8GHz.

According to the news site laptoping, Intel plans to further extend and upgrade its mobile computing platforms as after the Santa Rosa Refresh, the new Montevina platform will come, in the second half of 2008. This new mobile platform will feature central processing units based on the dual core 45nm architecture, while the quad core based processors will only come in the third quarter next year and they will be known as the Penryn QC family. Unfortunately for the quad core Intel fans out there, the Montevina platform will not support too many quad core processors.

Apart from improved central processing units from the Penryn class of products the new Santa Rosa platform will also come with better integrated graphics solutions, but as the current Intel graphics processing units are offering low and very low performance, do not hold your breath for ground breaking video effects.

Now Intel's mobile processing units are based on the 65 nanometer fabrication process and as the company will soon move towards the 45nm process, it is expected that all CPUs will offer higher performance levels while keeping the energy footprint low, as they offer a better performance per watt ratio.