Nice little Review on the P4 "Northwood" 2.4 Ghz chip : heres a tasty snipet for you...
As you shall recall, we have made the review of Northwood 2.2 GHz. about a month ago. And in the conclusion part, we have mentioned about the release of 1.6 GHz. and 1.8 GHz. Pentium 4s with 512 KB L2 Cache in some eastern countries. Now it is also possible to buy these processors in Istanbul as 1.6A and 1.8A. So the current Northwood series is now made up of 1.6A, 1.8A, 2.0A and 2.2 GHz. CPUs. And what we have here is the new member of this family, 2.4 GHz. Northwood. (We will have to wait till the last quarter of 2002 to see 3.0 GHz. Northwoods according to Intel's roadmap)
The main difference between the Northwood core and the previous P4 core, Willamette, is that now Northwood is built with 0.13µ (micron) production technology and has 512 KB L2 Cache. Moreover the copper material enables the use of thinner wires compared to the aluminum used in Willamette. (To help you get a better idea of the size, say that, hair has 60µ diameter). Willamette was using 0.18µ technology and had 256 KB L2 cache. Moreover, it offered frequency cores within 1.3 GHz to 2.0 GHz. range and had two models either using PGA423 or mPGA478.
Northwood will only use mPGA478 socket and the lowest core speed will be 2.0 GHz. Currently, there are two models on the market, one is 2.0 GHz. and the other is 2.2/2.4 GHz. Taking advantage of 0.13µ production technology, Northwood is 30% smaller than Willamette and in contrast has 55 million transistors. This means 13 million more transistors than Willamette. It is easy to guess that much of these transistors are used to increase the 256 KB L2 Cache to 512 KB.
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