Intel Developer Forum Fall 2002 - Day 2: Banias Galore

Anand (not me ;)...) didn’t hold back and provided some interesting information about Intel’s next-generation mobile CPU that we weren’t previously aware of.

The 0.13-micron Banias processor weighs in at 77 million transistors; you’ll note that this is a higher transistor count than the current 0.13-micron Northwood Pentium 4 processor. By far the biggest consumer of transistors is cache and thus we would expect Banias to have a fairly large L2 cache, probably around 1MB. We confirmed that the architecture is basically Pentium III derived with the addition of the features mentioned below.

Click to Enlarge

You can also see a large portion of the die reserved for cache in the shot above.

Click to Enlarge

Another slide provided a list of the following as features of the Banias architecture:

- Optimized Speculation
- Advanced Branch Prediction
- Micro-Op Fusion
- Dedicated Stack Manager
- Advanced Power Control (through granular hardware gating & enhanced speedstep technology)