Chip firm Intel has told customers close to its plans that a combination of the Conroe next gen chip and the 965 chipset will be good to go for when Microsoft Vista arrives. And it has a new ‘platform’ to play with. Averill Pro will be introduced in the third quarter with Conroe, the Q965 Express chipset but matched with ‘Averill Fundamental’, which will use the Q963 Express and the Pentium D chip. Intel now estimates it will be able to shift more than two thirds of its desktop processors to dual core by year end.
Firstly, when they say two-thirds of their desktop processors will move to dual core, do they mean the currently 32 bit processor like the Imacs or the 64 bit ones mentioned in the article?
And what about laptops? I’m looking for one “somewhat soon” (limited primarily by month-long waits on shipping dates), and I’m curious as to whether to go in for the Thinkpad T60/Macbook Pro now, or will that mean it’ll be obsoleted when the Yonah is replaced by Merom in ~6 months?
Does anyone know of any laptop manufacturer’s roadmap for this sort of thing?
Firstly, when they say two-thirds of their desktop processors will move to dual core, do they mean the currently 32 bit processor like the Imacs or the 64 bit ones mentioned in the article?
Both, I’d presume.
will that mean it’ll be obsoleted when the Yonah is replaced by Merom in ~6 months?
Only if you consider it obsolete just because there’s something better around. That said, Merom will be somewhat faster than Yonah at the same clock, even when not taking advantage of its 64-bitness.
But there won’t suddenly be a rush of 64-biy-only applications, because few really need it at the moment and because the vast majority of the install base will still be 32-bit for some time to come (including all those Athlon64s with Windows XP).
And not that I know anything about Intel’s plans, but surely they’ll want to get at least a couple of years of sales out of the investment in Yonah. I’d guess Merom will first go into high-end laptops as “Core Duo Pro” or some such.
Dual Core laptops such as Dell Inspirion 9400 and Toshiba T2400 currently use the Yonah 32-bit “Core Duo” processor which lacks Hyperthreading. Merom is expected to be released sometime this summer. Merom is also dual core but offers EMT64, Hyperthreading and increased cache. Merom will only be beneficial for consumers if laptop manufacturers can offer more than 2 GB RAM so as to take advantage of the 64-bit memory capability.
Merom offers Hyperthreading
That would be good, but have you got a source for that? I’d read somewhere that it wouldn’t have it, at least initially.
Merom will only be beneficial for consumers if laptop manufacturers can offer more than 2 GB RAM so as to take advantage of the 64-bit memory capability.
It’s got a new wider-issue microarchitecture that is expexted to be quite a bit faster than Yonah at the same clock rate. And while 64-bitness by itself may not be much use without larger memories, the other improvements that come with x86-64 can benefit at least some apps.
…is that Yonah will become the “value” line after Merom is released. After all Yonah is still “only” 32-bit, and marketing can always put a spin on things and say you “need” 64-bit. Just my 0.02¢.