Computex 2002 Day 2: ATI's R300, nForce2 & XScale PDAs

An Update on Prescott

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We first got confirmation of Prescott from Intel at IDF earlier this year and today we received a bit of an update.

It seems as if Intel is playing through all of the possible scenarios that could occur in the CPU industry over the next several months and may be pulling Prescott's launch in a bit. We're now hearing that Prescott may be launched as early as Q2 of next year or as late as Q3 which does fall in their original 2H-2003 estimates. Motherboard manufacturers are preparing themselves for a launch around mid-2003.

Currently Prescott is said to have a 667MHz FSB which is down from the 800MHz FSB Intel originally had expected. If you take into account that Intel is effectively abandoning RDRAM on the desktop side of things and that DDR333 won't be able to offer the 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth necessary for a 800MHz FSB then it makes sense to introduce Prescott with a 667MHz FSB. This doesn't mean that the chip won't eventually scale to a 800MHz FSB if/when DDR400 or DDR-II take off, but at its launch you can expect it to be a 667MHz solution. Intel may introduce both 533MHz and 667MHz FSB versions of the Prescott core but it's unclear at this point.

There's little information available about the architectural improvements Intel will be making to the core but we are continually hearing that the 0.09-micron core will be outfitted with a large 1MB L2 cache. Hyper Threading will be enabled obviously and the minimum clock speed for Prescott will be 3GHz. Considering that Intel is on track to be at 3GHz by the end of this year on the 0.13-micron Northwood core, we'd say that 3GHz is a very conservative estimate for the 0.09-micron Prescott.