The competition war between AMD and Intel blares on. Soon we’ll have a good chance to see Intel ape AMD experience to develop its own CPUs. The upcoming AMD Hammer CPU (the one which is to succeed Athlon XP at the desktop PC market and enter the server and CPU market) has made Intel feel very nervous.
One of Hammer’s key features is the support for x86-64 architecture, which allows for 64bit code. Intel desktop CPUs do not offer this opportunity. Intel implemented the 64bit architecture only in Itanium/McKinley CPUs priced at thousands of dollars, so it doesn’t work with desktop PCs. Besides, Itanium /McKinley CPUs perform too slow in regular 32bit applications.
The x86-64 from AMD is an advanced version of the existing 32bit architecture, therefore Hammer CPUs should have no problem with 32bit code. Another pleasant fact is that they will be at least 10 times cheaper than Itanium CPUs.
Having faced all those problems, Intel decided to create desktop CPUs that would be able to work with bot 32bit and 64bit code. As reported here, this decision resulted in Yamhill technology, which can be implemented in a new Intel CPU code-named Prescott. Prescott is another 0.09-micron die to be used in Pentium 4 processors due in 2003-2004. They will support Hyper-Threading technology intended for server CPUs alone.
Yamhill, a secret technology hitherto, will help 32bit Pentium 4 CPUs to work with 64bit code like Hammer processors do. Intel hopes that its CPUs will do without Yamhill, because it would be too humiliating for Intel to acknowledge that it takes up the lead of AMD. But if Hammer CPUs are a success, Intel will be forced to enhance Prescott processors with Yamhill. Perhaps, Yamhill will be implemented in Prescott to be enabled only in case of need.