X-bit labs

Intel’s Dual-Core Chips to be Available in May – Company’s President.

Category: CPU

by Anton Shilov

[ 04/07/2005 | 07:00 PM ]

The microprocessors from Intel Corp., dubbed Intel Pentium D and Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, that contain two processing engines and were reviewed by some web-sites back on Monday will be available in May, but it is so far unclear whether in the first half, or the second half of the month.

“Intel President Paul Otellini announced in Washington that the dual-core chips would become available next month, within the previously announced second-quarter time frame,” claims a Reuters report citing information obtained from Intel’s spokeswoman Laura Anderson.

Earlier this week Velocity Micro, a maker of high-performance computers tipped availability of its systems with dual-core processors inside in late second quarter. While the company did not elaborate over details, “late Q2” may mean anything starting from the second half of May. Still, given that the PCs from Velocity Micro are somewhat exclusive, availability at the company may not reflect that at general PC makers, such as Dell and HP.

“Available in late Q2 of this year, Velocity Micro will offer several new dual core based DCX systems with Velocity Micro's exclusive LiquiCool fluid cooling system… Velocity Micro will ship systems at the processor's default 3.2GHz, as well as systems performance tuned by the company with the addition of liquid cooling to run at 3.6GHz, 3.8GHz, and 4.0GHz,” Velocity Micro said in a statement.

Having two processing engines instead of one Intel Pentium D and Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processors will be capable of running many applications at the same time more efficiently than the Pentium 4, but the latter is likely to have advantage over the former in single-threaded apps because of higher clock-speeds, as the first dual-core microprocessors from Intel Corp. will work at 2.80 – 3.20GHz speeds, much lower compared to 3.80GHz of single-core processors.

Intel’s first family of dual-core chips for desktops originally code-named Smithfield will be sold as Intel Pentium D 800-series as well as Intel Pentium Extreme Edition family. Initial Intel Pentium D 800-series central processing units are likely to use 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, integrate 2MB (1MB per core) L2 cache and utilize LGA775 form-factor. The dual-core desktop processors will be made using 90nm process technology, each processing engine will use the same architecture with the current Pentium 4 “Prescott” chip, however, the new central processing unit will feature “arbitration logic that will balance bus transactions between the two CPUs.” All desktop dual-core chips are likely to sport EM64T, Virtualization, XD bit as well as Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technologies.

Intel is expected to disable the Hyper-Threading technology on its mainstream dual-core desktop chips, leaving the capability to process up to four threads simultaneously for its Pentium Extreme Edition chips that will feature two cores and will use 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus.

Intel Pentium processors with two processing cores will require a mainboard based on i945P/G- or i955X chipsets to operate. While the Pentium D chips themselves are expected be relatively affordable, an Intel executive advised not to expect rapid transition of the company’s desktop microprocessors to dual-core tech this year.