IDF: Intel unveils next generation desktop platform

By James Morris, PC Pro Editor, San Jose

Posted on 20 Feb 2003 at 09:14

Intel took the wraps off its future desktop PC plans on Wednesday at IDF. Central to its roadmap is the Prescott processor, set to be the successor to Pentium 4 HT

Prescott will be manufactured using the 90nm process on 300mm wafers, which will allow a 50 per cent reduction in die size. Intel claims this has enough headroom for the CPU to be scaled to 4 or 5GHz, although no set timeframe was announced. The NetBurst architecture has been updated, with 16KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2 - both twice the size of Prescott's predecessor. The Front Side Bus frequency has also been ramped up from 533MHz to 800MHz. 13 extra operations, currently codenamed Prescott New Instructions, have been added to SSE2, offering acceleration of various tasks from floating point and arithmetic functions to video encoding and thread synchronisation.

Supporting the Prescott will be two new motherboard chipsets - Canterwood and Springdale. Canterwood is the high performance, premium chipset and Springdale the mainstream version with an option for integrated Intel Extreme Graphics2. Both support 8x AGP and 'at least' 800MHz FSB Prescott processors. Both chipsets can operate with two channels of DDR400 memory, working synchronously with the 800MHz processor bus, and provide support for eight USB 2.0 ports, plus two Serial ATA connections with Soft RAID. Springdale will also be part of Granite Peak, a corporate-oriented program which pledges platform stability for six quarters - and one driver codebase across both the Springdale desktop and 855 Centrino mobile chipsets.

Intel remains bullish about its ability to continually increase processor performance. Since announcing the Pentium 4's scalability to 10GHz at IDF a couple of years ago, the company has become even more optimistic - and expects to be producing 15-20GHz CPUs by 2010.