Following a claim made by Intel Corp.’s chief about lower or equal thermals of the company’s future processors made using 65nm process technology, makers of mainboards now confirm that up-to-date platforms are ready to support the new breed of single-core and dual-core processors code-named Cedar Mill and Presler. The biggest disappointment for those who wanted to get a Cedar Mill is probably that it is allegedly not supported by previous-generation mainboards.

Microstar International, a large mainboard producer, recently announced that one of its Intel 945G-based mainboard supports Intel code-named Presler and Cedar Mill processors which are expected to be available starting early next year. An ASUSTeK Computer’s representative was quoted as saying at AnandTech web-site that “only Intel 975/955/945-base[d] [main]board[s] and some third party board[s] can support Cedarmill (better known as “Cedar Mill”, editor) and Presler” processors. The official for the mainboard company cited experiments as a source for the information.

Intel dual-core processors, such as Intel Pentium D and Intel Pentium Extreme Edition have always been supported only by Intel 945-, 955- and 975-series chipsets, whereas Intel 915- and 925-series core-logic sets were believed to support single-core Cedar Mill processors. The reason why the dual-core chips were not supported by earlier platforms was incompatibilities between chipsets and processors as well as slightly different pin-out of the dual-core chips. The Cedar Mill, being a part of Presler, might have inherited compatibility issues.

Intel’s Presler design features two independent processing engines located on a single piece of substrate. Current Smithfield design employs two processing engines located within a single piece of silicon. CedarMill is single-core flavour of the Presler with one processing core.

The Presler products, which are claimed to be branded as Intel Pentium D 900-series, are expected to be clocked at 2.80GHz, 3.00GHz, 3.20GHz and 3.40GHz and use 800MHz processor system bus. The chip will have 4MB of cache in total, or 2MB per core. Intel is also projected to launch “extreme” version of the Presler for enthusiasts. The processor which is claimed to be branded Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processor 955 will operate at 3.46GHz, sport 1066MHz processor system bus, feature Intel virtualization technology and will only be compatible with mainboards based on Intel 975X. Each of the processor’s cores will sport Intel Hyper-Threading technology and 2MB of level-two cache (which will result in 4MB of L2 cache per central processing unit in total). All the processors are expected to support such technologies as EM64T, EDB, EIST and iAMT2.