Cool pix of the upcoming P4 (Northwood)

[ST4RCUTTER]

Check it out

This smaller die should help Intel cut down on cost. The Northwood will be as small as the Athlon now, and should easily ramp to 3Ghz by year's end.

 

[AA0]

It'll save intel money, not you. Soon as AMD hits .13 aswell, their cores will shrink too. They are supposed to have them early next year.

 

[JackBurton]

<< An earlier super-cooled Northwood demo demonstrated a clock-speed of 3.5 GHz. This represents a 40% over-clocking ratio which is not unusual. >>


OH YA! Let's see who here can get their P4s to 3GHz first! Let the race begin...well, once the Northwoods hit the shelves.

 

[Pabster]

The only question is, how many more MHz will Northwood require to compete with Athlon? Hopefully a bit less than the current 400 or so.

AFAIC, the only 'improvements' (besides, obviously, a die shrink) are the additional 256K of L2 (512k total), and some new SSE2 extensions.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Well, besides cutting down on manufacturing expenses, it will also mean that Intel will be able to more effectively challenge AMD in the mobile space. The tualatin was reaching the end (as far as Intel was concerned) at 1.2Ghz.

 

[Bozo Galora]

Bozo had pictures of the ACTUAL chip:

link

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Are you sure about those? The first one looks a lot like a brick wall, and I only count 477 pins on the second...

 

[Shagga]

I would expect price cuts once this hits the streets in volumn. Is it still a January release?

 

[MoleX]

<< Are you sure about those? The first one looks a lot like a brick wall, and I only count 477 pins on the second... >>



you counted them? :eek

 

[Soulflare]

Will the Northwood P4's work on existing MBs (ie. socket 478),
or will they require yet another new motherboard?

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

They should, and it's everyone's hope that they will. I doubt it will be as big an issue as it was for the Tualatin. In the worst case, I can see a BIOS update being required...that should be it though.

 

[pm]

The link at the top of the page to the PDF file (which I'm linking directly here)is pretty interesting stuff too, although a little technical.

 

[thomsbrain]

I wouldn't expect them to make the Northwoods cheap, even though they'll be cheap to make. They need a higher margin to help get some cash into the company.