Intel's Shift In Architecture Design

[Vishal Gupta 4]

Much has been said about Intel's plans to shift its design strategy on the desktop platform over the last few weeks, but as the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that kicked off today the attendees finally got a glimpse at what it's all about. Three new cores have been introduced: The Conroe for desktops, the Merom for mobile platforms, and the Woodcrest for servers. The new processors will combine the best of both worlds from Intel's Pentium 4 desktop line and Pentium M processor for notebooks, sporting both a high front side bus speed while minimizing power consumption.

While the Prescott core P4's utilized a 31+ stage pipeline compared to the Athlon 64's 12, the new cores appear to have a 14 stage arrangement. This will allow for lower power requirements and more processing power per clock. Expect clock speeds upwards of 3GHz on the 65nm cores. While current models operate upwards of 4GHz, Intel claims five times the processing power per watt, which would be startling change in efficiency. Under the new architecture L2 cache is shared between cores. Intel states that the Conroe will have multiple versions with different L2 cache sizes while the Merom cores will feature only one model. This is presumably to allow room for "Extreme Edition" models of the Conroe with more L2 cache.

Intel's design shifts are no doubt exciting. With these steps we may finally see the abolishment of the MHz Myth, which has plagued the likes of AMD into using silly naming schemes in order to prove their processor's merit. There will be more to come as Fall IDF 2005 continues.