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Intel to Dump Pentium 4 in Favor of Pentium M

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-30%-lower-electricity-bills dept.

Opinion writes "According to The Register, Intel is to dump its Pentium 4 plans in favour of the new Pentium M architecture. The scrapped Tejas and Jayhawk processors represented Intel's next-gen 90nm P4 CPUs, due to arrive in 2005."

4 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. Power consumption is important by cpghost · · Score: 5, Informative

    The more laptops out there, the more important are power saving CPUs. Pentium-M's are a good step in the right direction after the P4 90nm debacle.

    Even in the server market, cutting on power consumption is getting more and more important. If you have a park of 1000+ machines in a data center, power consumption matters.

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.
    1. Re:Power consumption is important by getch(); · · Score: 5, Informative
      The issue of power consumption is rapidly becoming much more significant than even the parent poster realizes.

      The general dynamic power (operating power) equation for CMOS circuits has switching frequency as a squared term. Voltage and junction capacitance (think die size here) are also present, but are not squared.

      If Intel were to take the P-IV architecture as far as it had planned, an extra few bucks for electricity would be the least of its worries. Without some unforseen advancement, power per unit area would become a (relatively) intractable problem. Even though voltage and die size would probably decrease, the increase in frequency coupled with the reduced area would likely provide a serious problem for cooling. I've read papers that have estimated that air cooling won't be able to dissipate much more heat than it's already required to. Taken far enough, the head produced could just vaporize the silicon (obviously that's not occurring in the near future).

      In short: good move, Intel.

  2. Re:Religious Nomenclature? by kmcmartin · · Score: 5, Informative

    iirc, the Pentium M was designed at Intel's Israeli division, so this makes some sense compared to the old Washington/Oregon naming scheme.

  3. Re:Intel is so far behind anyway by LocoBurger · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Pentium M is based on the same P6 core as the Pentium Pro through the Pentium III.

    The really interesting part about this story is that Intel is going from their seventh generation architecture (Pentium 4) back to their sixth generation architecture (Pentium Pro/II/III/M).

    We all knew this Pentium 4 thing would go nowhere.. :) except for the millions and millions of dollars it got Intel. Now they're trying to gracefully back out. It seems like a sound technical decision. I say good for them.