Desktops to Have First Crack at Dual-Core Intel Chips

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel divulged its desktop and laptop processor and platform roadmaps a few weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and as it turns out, it is the consumers and companies who buy high-end PCs and workstations who will get the first chance to buy a dual-core chip from the company. Starting in the second quarter of this year, Intel will roll out its first dual-core processors in two different PC platforms, and next year, it will put dual-core chips into its mobile platforms.

In the desktop area, there are actually three different dual-core processors that Intel will put into its platforms. The first is a chip code-named "Smithfield," which will be available in two variations. Smithfield is a based on the Pentium 4 "Prescott" core, which has 64-bit memory extensions, Execution Disable (XD) security, and HyperThreading (HT) simultaneous multithreading in it.

Smithfield takes two of these Prescott cores and jams them onto a single piece of silicon, side by side, and puts them into the same LGA775 chip package as a single Pentium 4 chip would plug into. The two cores each will have their own 1 MB L2 cache memory and will share the 800 MHz front side bus in the motherboards that can house the chip.

Smithfield is implemented in a 90 nanometer process and has about 230 million transistors in it, all crammed into a 206 square mm piece of silicon. Intel intends to offer a high-end Smithfield processor as the Pentium Processor 840 Extreme Edition running at 3.2 GHz, which will have four processor threads activated.

A less-powerful and lower-cost Smithfield part will also be sold as the Pentium D processor, and it will have the HT features logically disabled by the chipset in the systems that use it. While the Pentium D (and the "D" is presumably for Dual core, not Dummed Down or Disabled) will run at the same processor speed as the Extreme Edition, but because HT is disabled, it will do significantly less work, particularly on thread-sensitive jobs.

The home desktop systems that will use these processors are based on a platform that Intel calls Anchor Creek, which includes the two Smithfield chips and their related 945G and 955X chipsets; the latter is used for the Pentium 840 Extreme Edition version of the chip.

Stephen Smith, vice president of Intel's desktop platforms within the newly constituted Digital Enterprise Group, said at IDF that the 955X chipset would include support for an 800 MHz or a 1066 MHz front side bus. The chipset will also support two-channel DDR2 667 MHz main memory with ECC error correction and capacities of up to 8 GB; the chipset will also support PCI Express X16 graphics and six PCI Express slots. Other features that high-end PC buyers want will also be thrown in, including high def audio, high-speed USB 2.0 ports, and an integrated RAID 1/5/10 matrix storage controller that links to four Serial ATA disks.

Because of the dual-core Smithfield chips and the extra threads in the Extreme Edition and because of other advances in the 955X chipset, the Anchor Creek platform will offer performance improvements of anywhere from 50 percent to 124 percent. Both multitasking across cores and multithreading across cores and using threads help boost performance on jobs that require a lot of computing.

The idea, says Smith, is to not only improve raw performance, but the end user experience as they do many different things with their machines. For instance, Smith says that the new platform would outperform a machine based on the current single-core Pentium Extreme Edition (which actually has a faster clock speed at 3.73 GHz and a 1066 MHz bus) by 124 percent when measuring how long it takes to record multiple television shows using a media PC while the end user is also playing a video game.

In the first half of 2006, the Anchor Creek consumer PC platform will also eventually support two other processors, the dual-core "Presler" chip and the single core "Cedar Mill" chip. The Cedar Mill chip is a Prescott-style core that will be implemented in 65 nanometer processes and will include a 2 MB L2 cache and support for XD, HT, and EM64T technologies.

The Presler chip is a dual core chip that will be comprised of two Cedar Mill chips placed next to each other and packaged in a multichip module to plug into an LGA 775 socket. The reason why Intel appears to be bothering with this packaging approach appears to have to do with expected yields with the 65 nanometer processes used to create Cedar Mill and Presler.

If Intel could make Presler with one piece of silicon, you bet it would. But the odds of an imperfection occurring in a piece of silicon with two cores next to each other are twice as high as one a single core. So Intel will be able to cut up Cedar Mill wafers, take the working cores, and make either single-core or dual-core modules from them. Incidentally, Presler will have HT disabled, but Cedar Mill will not. Why? Because Intel says so.

Smith said that Intel would offer a platform based on the Pentium D variant of Smithfield and the 945G chipset for corporate PCs, called the "Lyndon" platform. The Smithfield Extreme Edition processors (those have HT enabled, remember) will also be available in a workstation platform called Glenwood. How these workstations will differ from Extreme Edition PCs is unclear.

For higher-end workstations, Intel will create a variant of its "Blackford" Xeon DP chipset called "Greencreek" and will introduce the "Glidewell" workstation platform. This workstation will use the dual-core "Dempsey" Xeon DP processor, which will have larger caches as well as fully buffered main memory, the new I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) for boosting TCP/IP and other I/O performance, Virtualization Technology (VT) for hardware-assisted virtual machine partitioning, and Active Management Technology (AMT), which creates a system management partition on a workstation to enable it to be securely and remotely managed--even when the other partitions on the machine crash and burn.

On the mobile PC front, Intel has been hinting about its dual-core "Yonah" chips for laptops for some time. Yonah will be a true dual-core chip, implemented in 65 nanometer technologies. It will have two cores on one piece of silicon, and will be part of the "Napa" mobile platform. Napa is comprised of the "Calistoga" chipset and the "Golan" wireless LAN supporting chips. Napa piece parts are targeted to ship in late 2005, with commercial products expected in the first quarter of 2006.

The Napa Centrino platform will include improved graphics and better WiFi support (including electronics that improve the way laptops find hotspots and remain connected to them.) The chips in the Yonah-based Centrino package will also be 31 percent smaller than those in the original Centrino packaging. The Napa platform is also expected to have more power-conservation features, but the exact nature of these is unclear.