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pop pop
08-16-2005, 11:42 AM
Looks like the guys at Intel were reading our discussion/praise of the Pentium M architecture here in PCGuide (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=38857) , or maybe they read the THG article...or maybe they just looked at the data and came to the same inevitable conclusion. It looks like the new architecture that will be announced next week will be a branch off the Pentium M tree.

Although it does not run as fast as the Pentium 4 chip and lacks features such as 64-bit addressing, a given Pentium M uses about a quarter of the power of a similarly ranked Pentium 4 and performs nearly as well.

Thus Intel is expected to create the equivalent of a super Pentium M with some features that are also found in NetBurst, including Hyperthreading and 64-bit addressing.

The resulting chips are expected to be faster and to have more capabilities than the Pentium M, but be just as miserly on power.

These power-efficient, multicore chips will bump up the performance of notebooks and servers. But they're likely to have to most visible and drastic affects on desktops.

From: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1848474,00.asp

hockey man
08-16-2005, 12:56 PM
Yep, someone here, possibly saph., predicted the end of the p4 and the rise of the M.

jlreich
08-16-2005, 01:06 PM
Very cool. In related article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1823185,00.asp
The PM dual core "Yonah" looks promising. Part of the new "Napa"-based wireless notebooks due out in early 2006.

Among Yonah's new features is a shared cache or onboard pool of memory that holds data close to a processor core for quicker access. Dubbed Smart Cache, the design element allows one processor core to access the chip's entire 2MB level 2 cache.

The Smart Cache is important to performance, allowing one core to store as much data as it can in the cache. The feature is also key to power management, as a single core can access the entire cache when the other is shut down, while running on battery

EDIT - I like that Hockey Man, "the rise of the M". :D