IDF Spring 2005 - New Pentium D, No More 4

In the spirit of multi-core at IDF, Intel has officially named the dual core Smithfield based Pentium 4 processors - by ditching the number 4.

The desktop dual core processor is called the Pentium D, and here's its logo:

The 90nm Pentium D will debut at the following speeds:

Next up we have the Pentium Extreme Edition, also missing the number 4:

The Pentium Extreme Edition will only be launched at 3.2GHz and feature a 1066MHz FSB as well as Hyper Threading (2 threads per core, 4 threads total). The rest of the features remain identical to the Pentium D.

We can't help but think that the Pentium D logo looks a little too much like the Celeron D logo, but Intel has definitely made the Pentium Extreme Edition look somewhat more worth its price tag.

As we alluded to earlier, there is a bit of an issue with the way the Smithfield die is laid out in that it is a single piece of silicon consisting of two Prescott 1M cores. Although one of the cores can be cut away or disabled if it is useless, the problem is that we're now dealing with one very large core at 206 mm^2 and 230M transistors. Remember that chip defects increase by surface area, so manufacturing one very long piece of silicon lends itself to higher defects than two smaller pieces of silicon. Presler, the 65nm chip we talked about earlier today, gets around this by actually using two separate pieces of silicon for the two 65nm cores - Presler also uses the 65nm process to enable a full 2MB of cache per CPU, that's 4MB of total cache on a desktop processor.

More info as we get it...for those that are wondering, Gelsinger's keynote was infinitely better than Barrett's, in terms of interesting information.