The Consequence of Waking Up a Sleeping Giant: Intel Roadmaps Inside

Single Core Desktop

Now for desktop processing; we have good news and better news. The good news is almost all desktop Prescotts (including the Celerons) will get a 64-bit makeover real soon. Unfortunately, you'll still need to buy a new processor but the roadmaps indicate there will be virtually no price premium on the 64-bit versions. With Windows XP 64-bit release less than a few months away, it makes sense that Intel's 64-bit push comes strong and hard in the 9^th inning. We are particularly interested in how fully committed the roadmap details EM64T; even the puny Celerons get the instructions. You may recall that the Socket 754 Sempron processors are nearly identical to AMD's Athlon 64 processors with half the cache and the 64-bit instructions removed. It will be interesting to see how the two companies play this against each other as AMD will be the 32-bit SKU on the desktop when WinXP Pro x64 launches.

Just to detail the whole outline for 64-bit Socket 775 processors, here is a quick roadmap of what we have to look forward to:

As you can see, the EM64T enabled CPUs have incremented their model numbers by 1 relative to their non-EM64T counterparts. We're glad that Intel is making a clear distinction between the two variants, rather than simply adding a new suffix. Where there is no earlier part, like the 3.33GHz Celeron D, the model numbers do not have the +1.

The 3.73GHz Pentium 4 EE will show up real soon, if that's your thing, and it will become the second processor to support 1066FSB. We haven't been real impressed with the 1066FSB launch thus far, and a 300MHz bump in clock speed doesn't strike us as something that will revolutionize the performance desktop anytime soon either. However, keep in mind this new P4EE is very different from the previous 3.46GHz revision, and with a different core we may see a very different performance curve on the 1066MHz front side bus. The rest of the Intel roadmap neglects to mention any other 1066FSB processors, including the dual core behemoths, so the technology is either a little bit ahead of its time or simply a temporary dead end.

Next we have the great news. Not only will we see the launch of four Prescott 2M/Iriwindale processors next month, but soon after we will also get our first taste of Smithfield - several quarters ahead of what the previous roadmap had anticipated! Prescott 2M will launch with four SKUs listed below, along with a "670" model clocked at 3.8GHz sometime shortly after.

Like the other Prescott processors, Prescott 2M will launch with EM64T and XD, but it adds Enhanced Speed Step (EIST) as well. EIST is very similar to AMD's Cool n' Quiet as it dynamically ramps the clock speed of the processor to conserve thermals and power. However, the big difference between CnQ and EIST is maturity - EIST has existed in some form or another since the earliest days of the P6 architecture. How EIST will affect performance on everyday desktop processing - particularly on a processor with such a high clock speed - we leave for the actual launch date sometime next month.