After Conroe-L Intel Goes For Merom-L

The "battle" of multicore versus single core has had its share of supporters, each of them having their own set of arguments and convictions. But it's something that may go on and on forever, because these processors address different categories of users, and "one size fits all" just won't do in this case. An interesting aspect in the processor evolution is that, while the stock frequency of a single core processor went up to 3.6GHz, if I recall correctly, the dual core and now quad-core versions have more cores, and less MegaHertz.

And even though the Core microarchitecture has been the revelation of the decade, it still has made its appearance only in dual core and quad-core format. One of the attempts of taking a part of the entry level segment of the market includes the introduction of single core processors, but seeing how Intel did such a wonderful job at promoting the "Core", people don't want to go back to Netburst-based processors. Intel will bring out in June single core solutions based on the Core microarchitecture; these are the new Celeron 4xx processors.

On the other side, Intel has to look after the mobile market as well, especially with their Santa Rosa platform on the way, so, in the same hot month of June, they will also be releasing a modified version of the Intel Celeron M 520 processor. The processor stepping will change from Merom B-2 to Merom-L A stepping, these in term will represent a CPUID change which will require a new BIOS update for the supporting motherboard. An important aspect must be remembered, the update to Merom-L also implies "a minor die size decrease due to manufacturing optimizations to increase product availability."