IDF Spring 2005 - Day 2: The Yonah Scoop

Other Facts about Yonah

Mooly offered a few more tidbits of information about Yonah and the Napa platform:

1) The Golan WiFi solution will be a minicard, less than half the size of the Colexico wireless solution used in current generation Pentium Ms. The WiFi in Napa will be 802.11a/b/g initially.

2) Yonah will have full support for Intel AMT and VT, both technologies we talked about yesterday.

3) The heat sink on the development Yonah platforms is purposefully large because the chip is far from mass production, the shipping chip will have no problems running just as cool, if not cooler than current generation Dothan notebooks.

4) No comment on EM64T support, although we doubt that Yonah will have 64-bit support out of the box. Remember that Yonah's execution units are borrowed from the Pentium 3, moving to 64-bit execution units would make the chip significantly larger, similar to what we saw in the Northwood -> Prescott transition (although not nearly as extreme, since the pipeline would remain the same). For a mobile platform, that decision just doesn't make sense yet.

5) The chipset is also listed as being a "Small Form Factor", most likely meaning that the package is smaller, allowing for even tinier board layouts.

Final Words

In meetings since Mooly's presentation we've been piecing together even more about the future of Yonah and Intel's strategy beyond Netburst, it looks like the focus on SIMD FP/FP performance was a calculated one...