“Over a year ago at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum, Intel formally announced that they would be dropping the Pentium 4’s Netburst microarchitecture in favor of a brand new, more power-efficient microarchitecture that would carry the company’s entire x86 product line, from laptops up through Xeon servers, into the next decade. This past IDF saw the unveiling of some significant details about this new microarchitecture, ‘Merom’ or ‘Core’. Intel presented many of these details in a presentation on Core, and others were obtained by David Kanter of Real World Technologies. The present article draws on both of those sources, as well as my own correspondence with Intel, to paint what is (hopefully) an accessible picture of the new microarchitecture that will soon be powering everything from Windows Vista servers to Apple laptops.”
Before any reads this and rushes out to get a Mac, it’s important to note that the Core Solo and Core Duo processors do not use the Intel Core Microarchitecture, they use a modified version of Pentium M (code-named “Yonah”). This chip does not have the macro-fusion, wide bus, EMT64, or genuine 128-bit SSE features.
The laptop chip code-named “Merom” will be the first genuine Core architected chip released, followed shortly by Conroe for the desktop. These will still, apparently, be known as Core Solo and Duo (and possibly Quatro in Q1-2007), but will have different part numbers
I believe that Merom has been pushed back with Conroe and Woodcrest being brought forward.
As you note, it’s important to realize that today’s MacIntels run on what are essentially tweaked Pentium Ms (Yonah) and not chips based on the Intel Core (NGMA) architecture.
BUT! The chips should be upgradable.
So when one finally does arrive, we can swap them. I hope.
Ever since the Pentium 3 saw the light of day, I marveled at its magnificent performance. When Netburst was released, all that went down the drain. IPC sucked, badly I might add, and it took twice the clockspeed before it could match the impressive performance laid down by the Pentium 3, not to mention that it dissipated many more watts just to achieve this.
Thank the Lord those times are over. I no longer have to plan which room is going to need full-blast air conditioning (I live in the Caribbean, where temperatures easily exceed 35 C). Couple that with a PC running at full tilt, and the room quickly becomes unbearable to stay in.
For once, Intel’s engineers won over their marketing monkeys. This means that we’re in for exciting times ahead. I’m very anxious to see what this CPU is capable of, and the previews are already showing extremely promising results. 🙂
…despite the speculation. It is exciting and I do wonder what will happen if/when they introduce hyperthreading the core technology… or if they have something else in the planning stages for releases.
for us consumers, wonder what amd’s got under their sleeves. good times for us consumers