Intel officially reported that they are changing the core stepping of 0.18micron Pentium 4 processors on Willamette core in mPGA478 package from "D0" to "E0". The major aim of the new stepping is to correct the "errata" and to increase the dies yields. Strange as it might seem, the processor Vcore hasn’t been increased. Maybe this time Intel engineers managed to do with the die structure changes only.

You can easily suppose that the change of 0.18micron Pentium core stepping is made to work as well for future Celeron processors with Willamette-128 core, which will be made of the regular Willamette by disabling half of L2 cache. These CPUs will cost considerably less than its faster counterparts that is why high yields here are much more important to get normal revenues.

The CPUs with the new E0 core stepping can be distinguished from the predecessors by the CPUID ("E0" – 0F12h, "D0" – 0F13h), and S-Spec marking:

Frequency	D0	E0
1.6GHz	SL5VH	SL679
1.7GHz	SL5TK	SL67A
1.8GHz	SL5VJ	SL67B
1.9GHz	SL5VK	SL67C

The samples of 0.18micron Pentium 4 processors with the new core stepping will be available starting from April 16, the tests should be completed by June 10, and on June 24 Intel will start mass shipments of this CPU. Just in case let me remind that Intel has already started the discontinuance program for Pentium 4 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz and 2.0GHz.