As is known, a month ago Intel managed to release the first SRAM chips made with 0.09micron manufacturing technology. After that the first details about the Pentium 4 processors made with 0.09micron technology couldn’t help emerging. Let me stress from the very beginning that all this info is unofficial and Intel hasn’t yet commented on it in any way. Besides, there is still a considerable while left before Intel will start making even samples, and things can change both: for the better and for the worse. So, let’s get started.

The major thing is that Prescott will be not only a 0.09micron version of Northwood core, but will boast a number of enhancements telling positively on its performance. The first major difference will make the larger L1 cache for data. Different source report that it will get two times or four times bigger compared with L1 cache for data by Willamette and Northwood, i.e. it will be equal to 16KB or 32KB. Instruction Trace Cache may also be increased (see the details about Pentium 4 architecture in our articles on Willamette and Northwood). However, there is no other info on that as we don’t actually know its exact size by Willamette and Northwood.

The next pretty predictable innovation is the increase in L2 cache size. Here everything is more or less certain: it will be equal to 1MB (twice as big as L2 cache by Northwood, and four times as big as by Willamette).

Prescott is also reported to support an enhanced HyperThreading technology (see this news story), which allows working with one CPU, as if there were two or more of them in a system. As you know, this technology is already implemented in Xeon MP (Prestonia) CPUs.

One of the most interesting innovations in the upcoming Prescott processor will be Yamhill technology (similar to x86-64, 64bit 86x instructions). However, Intel hasn’t yet made up its mind about adding this technology to Pentium 4. Once they decide to add it, the die size of the Pentium 4 processor is expected to grow only 2% bigger. In fact, this is very small sacrifice for a promising technology trend (which can actually kill Itanium).

And in conclusion some very "down-to-earth" things, which are not so interesting compared with what has already been mentioned. The clock frequencies of the upcoming Pentium 4 Prescott are expected to be from 3GHz to 4GHz and may be even higher, Vcore – 1.2V-1.3V.