While barely out of the door, Intel is already planning an update to the Santa Rosa platform. In the second half of this year, Intel is looking to give hardware decoding support for HD DVD and Blu-ray content, coupled with their IGP. Given that their standard IGP is not designed to handle the higher quality content, their other choice was to deal with discrete GPUs – exactly the opposite that they want for Santa Rosa. Through the use of 3rd-party hardware, Intel will make native hardware acceleration possible so that newer laptops equipped with HD DVD or Blu-ray drives won't skip a beat.

They are planning a number of other improvements to Santa Rosa as well, such as DirectX10 support (currently being evaluated), hardware T&L, Shader Model 3.0 support and a number of “unspecified” features. Hopefully they will stick to what their mobile chipsets have excelled at, however, such as long battery life.