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The Prescott Core

Page 4 of 4

The Prescott Core

The Prescott may still be called the Pentium 4 as some tech sites have reported. Other sites have talked about it being called the Pentium 5. The first thing to note is that the Prescott core will be exclusively produced on 300mm wafers, unlike the Northwood which is produced on both 200mm and 300mm wafers. Each 90nm wafer will contain a total of 330 billion transistors.

Main Features

1MB L2 cache! -The Prescott will be the first desktop CPU to feature a whopping 1MB L2 cache. This very large L2 cache size will boost performance and help Intel stay competitive.

90nm process - The 90nm process is the next generation after the 0.13- micron process and will allow this CPU to be produced cheaper and ramp to higher clock speeds.

Seven layers of high-speed copper interconnects - The current Intel 0.13-micron CPU’s have 6 layers of copper interconnects. The 90nm process will feature a seventh metal layer and will allow for many more transistors-100M+.

1.2nm gate oxide thickness - (Very thin, thinnest ever)

50nm gate lengths - The 0.13 micron CPU’s have gate lengths of 70nm, Intel is just shrinking them down to 50nm which is very freaking small.

New low-k dielectric material - Beyond my knowledge.

Lower voltages - The 90nm transistors will run at around 1.20V! The core voltage of the Prescott will mainly depend on the clock frequency but most likely will be lower than the current standard (1.525V).

Strained silicon technology - A transistor is basically a switch that turn’s on and off. When a transistor is on it must pass current and when it is off it must stop current. Basically what Intel is doing is stretching the silicon to improve flow of electrons and reducing resistance. This technology will improve current flow by 10-20%

Hyper-Threading

Bus Speed - I have heard rumors of an 800 MHz bus (200 quad pumped) but I am unable to verify this.

As you can clearly see this is much more than a simple core shrink of the Northwood. The Prescott will supposively be able to ramp beyond 4 GHz and hopefully be an Overclockers delight. Due to 90nm process it should also run cooler and we hope that by using water cooling we can push this sucker beyond 5GHz, I guess we’re going to wait and see what happens. We will keep you up to date on this new core, as specifications may change.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my little rant and rave about current and upcoming technologies. I feel that Intel really has done a great job taking the performance market back and lowering their prices. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the AMD Athlon DT (Clawhammer) performs against Intel’s offerings (AMD might take back the lead once again!). Dual DDR solutions are coming very soon and are going to offer amazing performance over current single channel solutions. The nForce2 chipset from NVIDIA already offers dual DDR support. Many say that there is a small performance gain with the nForce2 because single channel solutions already provide enough bandwidth for the Athlon Bus. At least for the time being, Intel rules the processor world.

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