Leave it to Apple to steal everybody's thunder. For most of this year, it's been the hard-keypad-less iPhone which has stolen attention away from Web-surfing smartphones you can actually buy now. Today, Apple has shifted the spotlight away from some Intel teasers out of Computex in Taiwan, and gotten us all talking about its new Macbook Pro laptops, which use the Santa Rosa platform Intel was emphasizing at its Spring Analyst Meeting in New York last month.

I've created a veritable technology Chipwich sandwich, packing several disparate announcements into my lead paragraph, so let's unjumble the processor news:

In Taipai this week, Intel said that it's got a quad-core mobile processor in the works for 2008.

Intel has also worked with Asustek to design a chipset that'll enable the latter vendor to field a notebook for under $200. The machine will be aimed at emerging markets, which is industry jargon for China and India, where low-cost laptops will be the big sellers Intel needs to fuel its volume sales, now that North America is a mature market.

However, us mature-market customers also get more of an emphasis on heavier-duty technology. That's where Santa Rosa comes in. It's Intel's next-generation implementation of its Centrino wireless-notebook platform.

Santa Rosa is the next generation version of Intel's Centrino wireless notebook platform.view the image gallery

Intel hyped the heck out of Santa Rosa last month at its Spring Analyst Meeting in New York.

Although Santa Rosa laptops have been announced or hinted at by Dell, HP, and many others, Apple has pretty much stolen the Santa Rosa thunder with its new line of MacBook Pro laptops, announced today. Although the Apple press release
doesn't mention Santa Rosa by name (why should it?), this is the platform the new MacBooks are implementing.

They've got the defining characteristics of Santa Rosa, which are a Core 2 Duo processor, the fast 802.11n wireless spec, integrated graphics, and Intel's new "turbo memory." That last feature boosts hard drive performance with what's essentially a flash-based cache.

The big news here is that this is a really, really heavy duty wireless box. The 802.11n speac, increasingly just called "n" for short, can deliver data throughput of up to 74 Mbits/sec, compared with 19 Mbits/sec for its predecessor 802.11g spec. I haven't referred to 802.11n as a standard, because it's not quite a standard yet; it's a draft standard. The very long road to ratification is a story I won't get into here, but let's just say that Intel's placing 802.11n into a laptop platform means the technology has finally arrived.

However, Intel's isn't stopping with Santa Rosa (nor, undoubtedly, will Apple). Following in 2008 from Intel is a notebook platform called Montevina . This will be powered by a 45-nanometer, dual-core processor. However, Montevina will be most notable for its mix-and-match wireless. Montevina will have both standard Wi-Fi and the newer WiMax, which Intel is continuing to emphasize in hopes it will soon move into position as the dominant wireless standard of choice.
I don’t really know whether this dual-standard tactic of combining WiFi and WiMAX in the same platform will do much for either. Ane way to look at this is that Intel is attempting to stuff WiMAX--a technology which hasn't been all that popular--onto consumers.

On the other hand, WiMAX does do distance: It offers the high data rate of 802.11n, but supports it over such a longer stretch that it's almost unbelieveable. Standard Wi-Fi works over about 100 feet. WiMax covers a radius of 30 miles! (Yes, you read that right: 30 miles.)

A stumbling block to WiMAX deployment has been the existence of two competing versions of the spec. Setting up WiMAX networks won't be cheap either, so don't count on a WiMAX revolution anytime soon. Personally, I'm doubtful that it'll catch on; I believe 802.11n, as promulgated in implementations like Santa Rosa, will be the networking technology to watch in late 2007 and 2008.