The Pentium 4 is officially launched
About a year ago, when it was revealed that the Prescott core would stop at 3,80 GHz, everyone was shocked that the NetBurst architecture, originally promised around 10 GHz, was in its final days. It has since turned out to have been a bit of a hasty statement, as Prescott has been competitive ever since, but it has now become definitively certain: the future belongs to technologies with lower clock speeds that can execute more instructions per clock.
Since the Intel Pentium M line, unlike the Pentium 4, is an undivided success, meaning everyone recognizes that it is based on a fairly viable and efficient architecture, it is not very surprising that the Pentium 4 will be replaced by the Pentium M line for desktops as well. In addition, quite surprisingly knowing the manufacturer, the Merom codenamed version promised for the second half of 2006 will be fully compatible with the soon-to-be-introduced dual-core Pentium M, the Yonah.
Merom is working with a shorter 14-section pipeline, a very significant reduction from the current Prescott’s 31 steps. As is known, within certain limits, a shorter pipeline promises more executed instructions per clock signal, thus leading to more efficient operation even at lower frequencies. This number 14 is fairly close to the 64-stage architecture of AMD12 CPUs, so it is expected to be able to perform similarly to its competitors at the same clock speed. And its much more powerful floating-point processor also patches the last hole Intel brought with it with the advent of NetBurst.
Another interesting feature of the newly deployed architecture is that the two processor cores directly access the contents of each other's first-level caches, and it is easy to imagine that they will work fully with the second-level cache, providing significant performance gains over the simpler architecture used today.
The fact that Yonah's "platform", i.e. the group consisting of different related components, will also be compatible with Merom, makes it very easy to distribute the new desktop processor, no additional developments will be needed to customize the server environment. They promise that a single BIOS update will fix everything.
So Intel's NetBurst architecture, which drives higher clocks and primarily attracts customers, is officially kicking off the last ones. - For a desktop application plan for a Pentium M line. We think this is good news for everyone, as in a year we will see more efficient, quieter, better systems from Intel.
