Neowin.net - Intel Sampling Prescott Processors: 3.80GHz CPUs by Year End

Intel Sampling Prescott Processors: 3.80GHz CPUs by Year End

Posted by amin on 09 February 2003 - 12:33 · 9 comments & 1706 views

I managed to dig up some information that Intel is already sampling its Prescott processor. The chips are not final yet, but in the second quarter Intel will start to send its new 90nm CPUs to its partners. Since the chips that are sent to design partners should be made on more or less mature fabrication process, the information fully corresponds to the fact that the 90nm manufacturing technology is to be finalised by the middle of the year.

The New Prescott Pentium 4 processors will feature:
800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, 1MB of L2 cache,and Hyper-Threading II technology,
the newcomer will also include additional instruction sets, known as PNI – Prescott New Instructions (SSE3 maybe) that are proposed to further accelerate processing of streams. In addition, sources indicated that there will be a number of different flavours of Prescott processors this year with core-clocks varying from 3.40GHz to 3.80GHz. Note, that in the latest Roadmap Update, Intel officially only indicated 3.40GHz Prescott processors by the year end and 3.60GHz and above CPUs in the first quarter 2004. So, either Intel is trying hard in order to roll-out its 3.80GHz chips by the end of 2003, or, the company simply looks through this opportunity at the moment, but no decisions have been made so far. However we should not expect the 3.80GHz Prescott products to come earlier than next year.

Understand that even Intel cannot boost the core-clock speeds of their CPUs due to possible electromigration processes described in this news-story. Electromigration that results in CPU malfunction is caused by heat and voltage increase. With thinner fabrication processes, the possibility of the so-called electromigration effect increases drastically, so, there may be a problem achieving higher clock-speeds of the CPUs without loosing their reliability.

Note: this information is unofficial.

News source: IEBeta.net

We’ve setup a newsgroup for your feedback and/or questions on the tool. The newsgroup server is at betanews.microsoft.com. Your login to the newsgroup server will be “betanewsXXXXXX”, and your password is above. For more information on logging into and using the newsgroups, we have made instructions available on www.betaplace.com.

On Monday morning we’ll be adding a survey to www.betaplace.com to get your official feedback results in a way that we can easily quantify – i.e. yes, this seemed to work fine or no, you need to spend more time on this.

Many thanks for your time and your help! It’s been great to know that we’ve got such a solid, supportive community of beta customers that we can involve in important product validation such as this on such a short notice, knowing full well that several of you will find the time to provide valuable feedback.

Last but not least, I will, of course, have some goodies to send along to the two or three “most valuable testers” over the course of this beta.

Michael O'Connor

Program Manager - SQL Server

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#1 Posted by Mas_Experience on 09 Feb 2003 - 12:57: Its all very interesting but im gonna stick with the 3.40GHz, i cant see the point in waiting any more time for the 3.80GHz

#2 Posted by bilston on 09 Feb 2003 - 13:31: How are they ever going to achieve ultra high frequencies once they reach the limit for when electro migration WILL happen? Change architecture?

#3 Posted by kairon on 09 Feb 2003 - 14:01: Wow!!I wonder why Pentiums don't have Level 3 Cache like Macs though?This is gonna rock, especially the large cache and bus speed and SSE3 , this is gonna be a serious threat to AMD. I just hope AMD can keep up with some new advances of there own, I doubt AMD will ever support SSE3 though.

(1 reply) #4 Posted by DrunkenMaster on 09 Feb 2003 - 16:14: Now I might upgrade computers 6 or 8 months after this comes out ( it will be affordable by then ) it will be a huge jump from a PIII 800. Can't wait.

#5 Posted by xStainDx on 09 Feb 2003 - 19:21: I'm ready for these... [URL]http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=63446&s=486ead35efbdf97db1bb4c48868cbf19[/URL]

(1 reply) #6 Posted by Darkness2k on 09 Feb 2003 - 23:49: why will it take a whole year to get from 3.06 to 3.80? we went from like 1.5 to 3 last year... why is it slowing down

#7 Posted by leebobs on 10 Feb 2003 - 13:47: I think Intel and AMD need to focus on adding extra high speed instructions and purpose built processing piplines instead of ramping up the Mhz. Look at the GPU's out-there, they are more complicated than a P4 and run at like 15% of the speed

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