One more piece of news about Intel for this week: We have received the first detailed information - from our industry sources - about Intel's upcoming next-gen processor. Despite it is based on the mobile Merom core, Conroe will have the honor to debut Intel's new processor architecture in Q3.

The data that is available so far - FSB and memory speeds, clock speeds and naming - may give a first impression of what to expect from Intel later this year. Is it worth to wait?

Looking forward to read your opinion!

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/11/ [...] nch_in_q3/

Assuming you meant 2.66Ghz.
Wow, that's seriously going to give AMD a run for its wattage/performance/Mhz ratio!

Jeez, it's getting late - yes I meant GHz. Will have to change that headline :-) Thanks for the note!

I guess it's not 2.86 GHz but 1.86 GHz, isn't it ? Or Intel's numbers are still more confusing...

Multiplayers of 7 to 10. A i985 chip set is expected with a FSB of 1333. The Exterme chip will come out with that, expected to run 3.33 (333x10.)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/d [...] 34350.html

2.4Ghz conroe for $300~ will be tempting for me when i upgrade this fall. AMD will hopefully have a 4400+ or a 4600+ at that price to compete. A 2.4GHz Athlon X2 is just barely faster than a 2.4Ghz Conroe, based on benchmarks of the Pentium M/Core Duo i've seen.

It's great to be updated about Intel's plans since I am about to get a new motherboard.

But i didn't understand this part:

"[...]there is no indication at this time that users will be able to simply swap a Pentium D 800/900 processor with a Conroe chip"

Why not?

Will the latest motherboards for socket 775 like Asus P5N32 SLI Deluxe or
the ones based on the 975x chipset not be compatible with a Conroe processor?

Yeah I read the same thing. Apparently, the current X series chipsets Intel has now, will not be able to handle the new conroe platform. Not sure why or even if that's true. Sucks too because I just got a new gigabyte board with the 975 chipset which I've set aside in hopes of dropping a conroe chip in it. Hard to say at this point what Intel is up to as far as that goes.

At games that is.

If you have a i975X then you should be able to handle Conroe with a BIOS update. The i975X was built to support dual cores with a 1066MHz FSB which is exactly what Conroe will be. The i975X also appears to be able to support a 1333MHz FSB, which is a BIOS option in some Intel boards, so that may be for future Conroe XEs. The motherboards that don't look to support Conroe are the i945 and i955 which will be replaced with the i965. Since no replacement for the i975 has been announced it will likely remain although it may be refreshed.

At games that is.

WRONG

How about Asus P5N32 SLI Deluxe?

Will that board support Conroe?

You are correct, it is 1.86 GHz.

About the swap issue: This roadmap update is very preliminary but credible information. Typically, such a simple upgrade is a major marketable feature of a platform, however, such a feature has not been pointed out yet. So it is fair to say that you may not be able to simply throw out a Pentium D and replace it with a Conroe CPU. As soon as there is an official answer from Intel, we of course will publish an update.

The future of i975X is interesting. And even if we received our information from industry sources, we are fairly certain that this chipset won't be able to support FSB 1333. As far as we know, we will have to wait well into the transition to DDR3 to see FSB 1333 support. The information we received suggests that Intel will actually launch 1333 MHz support in Q2 2008 in the performance and mainstream segment. FSB 1600 will follow in Q2 2009.

Wolfgang

I personally will wait to see. This is a new process and a new marcgitecture sort of and I will be surprised to see ti outdistance what AMD will have out then. I am by no means an AMD fanboy but I get so sick of unreleased products being the savior of any company.

This is worse than ATINVidia.

I will be glad to see some benchmarks on the chip though. Intel has been thoroughly embarassed for the last few years. I think to be fair you should mention that AMD is planning to increase to 333 HyperTransport and DDR2-667 should enable their on die controller to offset a lot of Conroe's advantages. WIth proper tweaking, I think their 90nm will get to 3GHz and with the aforementioned improvements, it will be a real fight.

It looks to me like AMD is being very tight-lipped on purpose but if the past is an indication, the Opteron will be the first 65nm chip. It is supposedly going to use DDR3 and should get to 3.4GHz at least. That will be a monster. Again I am for neither company but Intel is always given the benefit of the doubt but the last 3 years have seen them struggling as if they were Cyrix.

If AMD just keeps their current rate of increase, Intel will not catch up using Conroe.

AMD is very quiet these days, but we know that the company is very confident that it will be able to keep its lead with the transition to DDR2. You can read our interview to get an idea how much AMD is willing to publically say today:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/20/ [...] d_q1_2006/

It is too early to speculate which company may have an advantage by the end of this year. But we do know, that Intel will do everything it can to catch up with AMD - while AMD at least indicates that it has enough headroom left to be able to react. So there's a good chance that we will see much more progress in this industry than what we have seen in the past several years.

Most impressive work I've seen so far from TG Pulishing!
Keep it up guys.

It has been my opinion (and I think, that of many others here) that, in the not too distant past, THG showed a clear and distinct bias towards Intel's offerings.
I have noticed that, in the last few months, a real effort has been made to rectify that situation.
I wish to say, that I am pleased with this transition, and hope that those efforts are continued.

What if it goes to far and ends up like 2001 again? :?

That's good to know and thanks for the info. Ya know, I gotta tell ya, there sure is a storm brewing around the conroe platform. I read the review on my board, which is very highly rated and yet, I read another article saying that it won't support conroe. I'm so confused!!!

I honestly think Intel should send me a free Conroe chip for all this aggravation, pain and suffering i'm experiencing because of their marketing department!

I really do agree with that. Unfortuneatly, if they sent a free chip to everyone who was driven to distraction by thier PR department, they wouldn't have any left to sell.

Yeah this will be a good year for consumers. Intel should make up some ground but AMD has a lock on the server space right now and probably will for a few years. No one can touch the Opteron 880 and I'm kinda glad because it's not about who does it, but these chips are just catching up to the snappiness of the Alpha, my favorite chip in the world.

I think Intel has gotten the message that AMD is not going anywhere and they have realized that they can't keep 80% share for that much longer. Fortunately the amount of PCs sold every year actually goes up so 60% market share now is worth more than 80% share 5 years ago.

Maybe now the PC manuf's will actually be able to raise their margins. It's a shame when you look at how much money HP makes in comparison to Intel on PC sales.