Wolfgang Gruener, over at Tom’s Hardware, noted that Intel released a Product Change Notification (PDF) that they are discontinuing production of nine Intel® Core™2 Duo processors and Intel® Core™2 Duo processors LV, code-named Merom.
It seemed like I was just writing in anticipation about Merom and Santa Rosa but that was actually back in September, 2006, when I was contemplating the purchase of a Merom laptop. I bought a MacBook “Late 2006 Core 2 Duo,” which lacked that “Santa Rosa” Centrino chipset but the T7200 processor does have a 4MB L2 cache. The current Macbooks (late 2007), use the 2.0GHz or 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an 800MHz FSB, and the Santa Rosa chipset with the Intel GMA X3100 GPU.
My Macbook still doesn’t feel slow yet, even though the 1 year warranty expired last November. I somehow doubt that’s a testimony to Vista or Leopard, though.
