The Source schrijft dat Ome Tom het een en ander kwijt wilde over Intel's roadmap voor de nabije toekomst. In het verhaal komen helaas weinig neuheiten naar voren, wel schetst Tom o.a. een aardig (koud) beeld van de huidige en toekomstige Pentium 4 situatie. De meer mainstream Pentium III CPU wordt zoals bekend dit jaar verfrist met een Tualatin core, die in ieder geval kleiner, zuiniger en sneller gaat worden. Of hij ook een Quad Pumped FSB zal krijgen is nog onduidelijk. Volgens Tom zal er waarschijnlijk wel een versie met 512kB L2 cache verschijnen voor notebooks en workstations.
Hieronder heb je een kleine opsomming van de inhoud:
All those code names are a bit confusing and I didn't feel like writing about each product. However, I want to give you a few comments that are hopefully helpful to understand the whole enchilada.
- 'Northwood' will be the next-generation Pentium 4 processor, which will not be backwards compatible with previous Pentium 4 platforms. Northwood is expected in Q3, 2001.
- 'Tualatin' is the next generation Pentium III processor. It will also require a new platform, either the B-step i815 chipset or i830 Almador. The latter seems to have been dropped for desktop systems however and might only appear as i830M in notebooks.
The normal Tualatin for desktop systems is supposed to come with 256 kB second level cache, while the notebook version will have 512 kB. However, there is supposed to be a Socket370-version of 'Tualatin-512' available as well, targeted to dual processor systems.
The roadmap says that Tualatin will be priced higher than Pentium III, but also higher than some Pentium 4 processors. Prices for Tualatin are not available yet, but are expected for March.- 'Foster' is the workstation/server version of the Pentium 4 that we know now. It will be supported by the i860 chipset, which is a workstation version of Intel's 850 chipset. Later there will be Foster processors with integrated third level cache for multi-processor systems. I expect that Foster will receive the official name 'Pentium 4 Xeon'.
- 'Prestonia' is the 'Xeon'-version of 'Northwood' and thus the next-generation workstation/server processor after 'Foster'. It will also be manufactured in 0.13-micron process and it might also require a different socket than 'Foster'.
- The 'Plumas' chipset will probably be the workstation/server version of 'Brookdale', including DDR-SDRAM support, but also dual processor and maybe even MP-support.
Voor het complete artikel moet je even hier klikken.