Meet Willamette

Sand to silicon continued

After the Gigahertz Pentium III demonstration, next up Yu briefly discussed Intel's next generation processor "Willamette." While earlier Pentium II's and III's were originally based off the Pentium Pro core, Willamette is an entirely new, 7th generation microarchitecture.

Named after a nearby Oregon river, it was later revealed during a separate presentation that the Willamette team was the same group of engineers who designed the original P6 core. During Yu's demonstration, Intel's frequency ID utility was used to verify the processors clock speed, initially displayed at 1450MHz. The frequency ID utility then slowly rose upward until finally settling at 1500MHz. (1.5GHz)

To be honest, I've never used the frequency ID utility myself so I'm not very familiar with it, but during the demonstration I was curious how the processor was able to dynamically adjust its clock speed. Yu used no third party utility to adjust the clock speed; it "magically" rose right on schedule.

In any case, the ID utility clearly read 1.5GHz but it would be interesting to learn if the processor dynamically adjusted its clock speed or if the ID utility was somehow scripted to originally read 1450MHz.

Roadmaps Revealed

After the crowds' positive reaction, Intel's 2000 roadmap was displayed. Broken up into different segments, we'll mainly focus on the desktop systems, as we know that's what you're interested in.

In the value segment, Intel plans to shift the Celeron to a 0.18-micron die running at 600MHz sometime during the latter half of the second quarter. It's assumed that this 0.18-micron Celeron will offer a 100MHz front side bus although this was never officially confirmed during the conference. The chipset of choice will not be the 440BX; rather the Intel roadmap lists 810E. In fact, 440BX was entirely off the radar. Therefore, expect Intel to end BX shipments shortly.

With this change in die size, the Celeron will also transition to the FC-PGA form factor currently used by some "Coppermine" Pentium III's.

During the second half of 2000, Intel plans to release Celerons in excess of 700MHz with the 810E chipset and 815.

Also during the second half of 2000, Intel plans to release their next low-cost processor, codenamed "Timna." Designed by Intel engineers in Haifa, Israel, Timna is named after a national park in that country.

To clarify, Timna is not a low-cost version of Willamette; it's based on the same P6 core as Intel's Pentium III and Celeron processors. Its key feature will be integration, offering an integrated L2 cache, (size undisclosed) memory controller, and graphics controller; Timna is aimed at sub -$600 PC's.

Yu briefly demonstrated a Timna processor during his presentation, but didn't offer details on clock speed. The latest reports however predict it to launch in September at a clock speed of 667MHz.