Intel to Dump Pentium 4 in Favor of Pentium M

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."

Comments

Good Idea

[derphilipp]

This seems like a really smart idea. Dont go an get the Ultra-Gigaherz-Processor but a descend, processor that consumes only a low amount of power -> Longer batterylife for laptops -> Silent PCs -> Longer lifetime of the processor (?)

Religious Nomenclature?

[Himring]

Dothan is in due course expected form the basis for 'Jonah', Intel's first two-core Pentium M, due to ship during H2 2005, possibly at 65nm. To date, Jonah has been scheduled to be succeeded by 'Merom' and 'Conroe', two chips based on the same architecture, during H1 2006. While Merom is to be pitched at notebooks, Conroe - crucially - is a desktop chip.

Dothan: Meaning: two wells. A famous pasture-ground where Joseph found his brethren watching their flocks. Here, at the suggestion of Judah, they sold him to the Ishmaelite merchants (Gen. 37:17). It is mentioned on monuments in B.C. 1600.

Jonah (We all know who Jonah was and/or you need to back to sunday school....)

Merom (WebBible Encyclopedia) - christianAnswers.Net. Merom. Meaning: height. a lake in Northern Palestine through which the Jordan flows

Looks like Intel got some religion....

Is this surprising ?

[data1]

It has been known for quite some time that the Pentium-M processors would outperform desktop chips even when clocked at a higher frequency.
Seems that Intel finally wised up and is exploiting the technology in the Pentium-M Chips to lower its development costs even though that isnt explicitly stated in the article.
Yes, I did RTFA.

About the P-M architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

Ars has an in-depth article on the Pentium-M architecture. A quote from the conclusion:

The PM takes one of the P4's strengths--its branch prediction capabilities--and improves on it, adding its advantages to the strengths of the P6 architecture. The PM also deepens the P6's pipeline a bit, allowing for better clockspeed scaling, but without making clockspeed the central factor driving performance. In short, the PM looks like what the P4 might have been, had Intel not been so obsessed with the MHz race--it's a kind of alternate past, but one that may provide a glimpse of Intel's future.

Re:braniac vs. speed demon

[Yoda's Mum]

The long pipeline approach was sustainable for a while, but with their newer processes (like the 90nm process used for the Prescotts) the heat costs of having the longer pipelines have proven too high. Their long pipeline design worked quite well for the Pentium 4's - give them enough cache, and they perform spectacularly, but the even longer pipelines required to keep cranking the clock speeds up, as with Prescott, are starting to be quite detrimental to the design. The Prescott architecture may be able to run at much higher clock speeds than the previous Northwood P4's, but they do so at the cost of requiring an even larger cache, and a much improved branch predictor. Had the improved branch predictor and increased cache simply been implemented on an existing Northwood core, and if Intel manufactured the chip on their 90nm process, it's quite likely that they'd have an even better performing chip than what Prescotts are capable of at higher clock speeds. That's all conjecture though - Intel didn't go that way, they let their marketing people decide on what the Prescott was going to be, and are now paying for it.