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• A Sneak Peak at Intel's 65 nm Pentium 4

  History draws a somewhat ambivalent image of Intel's top selling microprocessor, the Pentium 4 , because of its nearly picture-perfect career that lasted until an unprecedented turning point. Intel platforms are versatile, processors are fast and fully featured today; but they run hotter and consume more energy than comparable products offered by the competition. It all began with a radically new 180 nm processor design in 2000, which was created for the main purpose of outperforming the Athlon competition by pure clock speed alone. Less than a year later, the chip was shrunk to 130 nm and a new platform based on socket 478 was introduced. Quickly, clock speeds had rushed from 2 to 3 GHz , giving Intel the lead it sought. Later on, the platform was renewed twice , but performance levels did not really increase much any more. At the same time, criticism about the Pentium 4 Prescott core was reaching new heights, as the chip and its derivatives with 2 MB L2 cache as well as the dual core Smithfield were disappointments. Today, AMD has the lead in both the single and the dual core desktop segments thanks to processors that not only perform better in most typical benchmarks, but they also require a whole lot less of power to do the job. This is obviously why Intel now focuses on platform solutions rather than on components. However, we have to emphasize that this is the clear trend for the whole hardware industry, since hardware performance is something that is sufficiently available to everybody today. Even a low-cost processor will be fast enough to power the vast majority of today's applications. Convincing people to buy something new requires the vendor to show what can be done with the new device. In any case, it is never wrong to make product improvements when possible. In the case of the Pentium 4 processor, which is going to remain the top seller for some time, these are mostly thermal issues and the addition of features that will enable future (virtualization technology or VT is one of them). So what improvements will Cedar Mill offer?

• Our look at Intel's dual core Pentium is now one month old. While our article was a detailed product preview only, Intel launched the Pentium Extreme Edition a few weeks after the sneak peak, together with the 955X platform. However, we have not done a review of the new Intel dream combo yet, as it is both unreasonably expensive and not really generally available. In addition, the changes from the 925XE to the 955X chipset are rather evolutionary (DDR2-667 and optional RAID 5 support). However, there will be a small 955X roundup shortly. Also, one should not forget that there is an appealing alternative called nForce4 Intel Edition . The real dual core launch will be around the time of Computex later this month. While AMD states the X2 won't be shipping in decent quantities before late summer, Intel very likely could already provide lots of dual core Pentium D processors. Yet the chip giant has to be patient, until the motherboard makers are ready with their 945 boards. Asus P5ND2-SLI, NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition We tried to provide an ideal platform for both the AMD and the Intel processors, so the Socket 775 motherboard we chose was the Asus P5ND2. Using the nForce4 Intel Edition chipset was an almost obvious choice, since it is available and also has some slight performance advantage over the Intel core logic. This is due to NVIDIA's memory controller, which benefits from the firm's long experience in the 3D graphics business. In addition, the feature set of both nForce4 platforms obviously is very comparable.

• Finally, this seems to be the Pentium 4 processor we would have loved to have seen a year ago. Though the Cedar Mill sample we were borrowed from a third-party whose name we will not disclose is an early qualification sample and still somewhat away from production-grade silicon, it is apparent that Intel's promises regarding its 65- nm production process' future will likely see fruition. Not only has the production process been modernized: Intel is going to produce 65-nm chips in Hillsboro, Oregon (D1C, D1D), Chandler, Arizona (Fab 22) and Leixlip, Kildare, Ireland (Fab 24). Also, Intel managed to implement energy-saving features such as sleep transistors that apparently help to bring down leakage currents and, finally, heat dissipation. We still can't talk much about virtualization technology (VT) today as this is something that cannot possibly be reviewed by just running some benchmarks within a couple of days. Those of you who may be disappointed by the lack of performance gains should keep in mind that Intel might easily be able to finally add faster Pentium 4 processors at 4+ GHz if there is market demand. At the end of the day, the TDP of 86 Watts is still pretty far away from the 130 W that today's performance FMB would allow for. With the performance per Watt level Intel is obviously capable of offering by the end of this or the beginning of next year, the Pentium 4 based on Cedar Mill also has bright prospects of being used for a tremendous number of Viiv based consumer system solutions which is a space that still requires addressing by AMD. Get going, Texas, because Intel is almost back on the road.