With the new iMac, Apple released its first hardware model based on the new generation of Intel mobile platform, known as Montevina, the successor of Santa Rosa. This new generation was supposed to be officially unveiled during the worldwide renowned Computex Taipei 2008, taking place on June 3-7, 2008. So Apple seems to have had a special agreement with Intel, and is the first manufacturer to release a computer based on Montevina.
Montevina supports the 45-nm Penryn Core 2 Duo processor currently used in the last version of Santa Rosa (MacBook and previous iMac). But it also opens the doors to Core 2 Duo supporting faster FSB to 1066 MHz, higher clocked CPU from 2.26 GHz to 3.06 GHz, support for SSE4 instruction set. The power consumption should also be lower, but the high-end CPU will should not end-up in the next revision of Montevina-based MacBook Pro.
The Montevina Intel Mobile 45 Express chipset, also known as Cantiga, will bring new and promising Intel GMA X4500 graphic unit. While it will remain a shared memory GPU, its clock speed should be ranging from 533 to 640 MHz, and its core will sport 10 shader units.
Montevina will also bring support for the DDR2 and DDR3 RAM, and the DDR2-667, DDR2-800, DDR3-800 and DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM modules will be compatible. As Montevina supports the DisplayPort, it will be interesting to see if Apple add it to the new iMac, or keep it for a future revision.
