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Intel Confirms New CPU Architecture to Launch in Late 2006.
Intel Says Conroe, Merom, Woodcrest are Not NetBurst-Based

Category: CPU

by Anton Shilov

[ 05/12/2005 | 11:12 AM ]


Patrick Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel Corp., confirmed in an interview with German journalists that the company’s second-generation dual-core microprocessors would not be based on the NetBurst architecture that powers the majority of current client and server processors from Intel. Instead, the giant will employ an architecture that will be concentrated on delivering more performance per clock cycle, but will not necessarily be a high-speed one in terms of megahertz.

“With our products, which are developed under the code names Conroe, Woodcrest and Merom [we will say goodbye to NetBurst],” said Patrick Gelsinger in an interview with Golem.de web-site answering the question whether Intel will cease to use NetBurst architecture with certain future processors.

This is the first official confirmation that Intel’s second-generation dual-core processors are not based on the NetBurst architecture that allows very high clock-speeds, but is not cannot match some of other architectures in terms of performance per clock and performance per watt.

“The Pentium 4 has a very deep pipeline. That was among other things necessary for the high clock-speeds, however, it caused lower efficiency in terms of high power consumption and performance. We decided for a number of reasons to employ an architecture less deep pipeline. In this regard that resembles rather the Pentium III. But some of the functions we introduced with the NetBurst, will also be found in the new architecture,” Mr. Gelsinger added referring to technologies like Hyper-Threading and Virtualization.

Late last week Intel’s president and COO, who will soon become the CEO of the world’s largest chipmaker, said Intel would launch “second generation dual-core processors” Merom, which would succeed Yonah, and Conroe, which would succeed Presler, in late 2006. He did not elaborate whether the company would ship the chips for revenue late next year, or Intel would launch the chips in late 2006.

Intel Merom processor itself reportedly is not a yet another Banias-like architecture, like Dothan and Yonah, but, as some sources proclaimed, “completely revamped” dual-core product also intended for mobile computers with relatively low power consumption, but still with rather high performance per clock, about 20% - 30% higher than that of predecessors, according to the claims.

Intel’s microprocessor code-named Conroe is expected to remove certain power constraints and probably widen thermal envelope of the Merom. Additional performance tweaks are also possible to bring extra speed, but the conception of a chip will still remain – a low-power highly efficient central processing unit. In addition, the Conroe will have to support the whole breed of desktop features, including virtualization capabilities, LaGrande technology, 64-bit capability in addition to EDB, EIST and iAMT2.

shocky123

soo... Intel finally realized that ramping the cpu clock to unbearable speeds didnt actually produce performance increases.. *snickers* It only took them what? 6 years since the P3? .. sh*t let me be COO/CEO/In charge, woulda pushed for this much sooner.

-good news nonetheless-
~Kyle

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gear02

Does this mean AMD is in the lead?

hapoo

they realized that when they started the new naming structure on the cpus... ie: Pentium 4 740, whatever that means

AmRivlin

woot... I still use a AMD 1.7 and PowerPC 1.1 rarely do I require more speed except in load times, but even then, it is fast enough for me.

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Dman33

It is about darn time they finally get away from the Mhz war. I was getting really tired of trying to explain that Mhz/Ghz does not really mean that much when comparing say an UltraSPARC with a Xeon. Completely apples and oranges because of the instruction code...

I hate explaining that.

mcs328

AMD I believe is making is killing Intel in performance and price according to the tests floating around the net. Still AMD hasn't overtaken Intel I guess market wise. Maybe they save money not advertising as much as Intel. I don't remember one AMD tv commercial.

Anways...horray for competition!!

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BrewMaster

i saw and AMD Free Wirless Hotspot sticker on the door of a cafe the other day. I didn't know AMD was sponsoring that. I don't think it's a direct shot at the whole centrino thing, but it looks like competition is helping.

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