Intel is sampling Conroe Extreme Edition

[NathanE]

They'll cost no more than the current crop of NetBurst's to manufacture. Conroe has probably half the amount of transistors NetBurst has. That's why Intel is bunging such big caches on - because they can afford to.

They won't be stupidly priced. Intel wants to shift away from NetBurst ASAP. They'll have similar prices to the Pentium D's at the moment.

 

[hogfather]

Oh that's cool. How can they manage to have half the transistors? Sorry if that's a bit noobish!

 

[NathanE]

It's derived from P6 architecture which has a very low transistor count (in comparison to NetBurst). The PII for example had about 5,000,000 transistors IIRC.

With NetBurst they were literally using around 100,000,000 transistors alone just on power management and obtaining the high clock rates (possibly more on the current crop of P4s, e.g. Prescott and Presler). That's a lot of die space to dedicate on something that doesn't actually increase performance. Wasteful. Conroe doesn't have that problem so they can use the saved transistors on extra cache.

 

[Sumanji]

I think the Conroe Extreme Editions have 8MB L2 cache too. Regular Conroe's "only" have 4MB

IIRC the XE's have 4MB and the regular chips have 2MB.

Suman

 

[NathanE]

Nope Conroe definately has 4MB L2. That's confirmed. I was merely speculating that the XE's may have 8MB.

Merom (the mobile variant of Conroe) has 2MB L2. That could be the cause for confusion.

 

[flashdjdan]

As far as I know all the conroe chips have 4MB of cache

And subzero, they are ditching hyperthreading with the conroe chips - they dont have such a long pipeline as the P4, so dont need HT to keep it full as much as possible. They are all dual core anyway.