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Intel "East Fork" Technology Migration

Posted by Hemos on from the moving-towards-the-M-class dept.

Hack Jandy writes "When Intel's Centrino platform first unveiled, industry experts were surprised to see such great performance of the Pentium M, based off Intel's P6 (Pentium III) architecture. According to sources in the industry, Intel has officially adopted the approach to migrating Pentium M to the desktop (hence, "East Fork") to offset some of its Pentium 4 processor sales. Cheaper, slower, cooler, but higher performing processors are on the way to an Intel desktop near you!"

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why do this? by Slack3r78 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In what way is the Pentium M "dumbed down?" Quite frankly, I'm firmly of the opinion that it's the best processor that Intel has produced to date, and I'm not alone in that view point.

    The Pentium M is based on the old P6 core, with things like SSE added it to bring it up to current standards, and power saving circuitry of its own added in to suit the mobile role. The one major complaint about the chip is the fact that it's somewhat bottlenecked by a 400MHz FSB, but there's speculation that that's partly related to it currently being a mobile part. Even so, a relatively low clocked Pentium M compares very favorably to a much higher clocked P4.

    Basically, the Pentium M is a move back to a P3 type design philosophy, away from the 30-stage pipeline madness Intel's gotten themselves into with Prescott. I fail to see how going with a more intelligent design is going with a dumbed down processor.

  2. Big changes at Intel? by data1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seems the company is trying to go in a significantly different direction to retain its market dominance.

    1) New Non Engineer CEO :
    http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/business/2004/0 411 151128.asp?S=Career%20Moves&A=MOV&O=FRGN

    2) GHz No longer a big deal after marketing it for so many years as the only major thing you need to know about the performance of a computer.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/14 /intel_kill s_4gh/

    3) Shift to Better if not necessarily newer technology - see article above: oh who am I kidding....
    http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipsets /display/2004 1111133206.html

  3. Not quite. by glrotate · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Inquirer article concerned the 1st Gen P4 Xeons with 1MB L3 vs P3 Xeons with 2MB L2. The article is 2 years old.