14 DAY TRIAL // Because rumors started to spread about the possibility of having Intel shift toward using the Pentium M in desktop PCs, all eyes in the hardware world are on Intel's dual-core Pentium M, code-named Yonah, which will be launched later this year. The Pentium M delivers comparable performance to the Pentium 4 on most applications, while running much slower--and therefore using much less power.
Even if Intel made no changes to the current Pentium M design to improve power consumption on Yonah, which is unlikely, a dual-core Pentium M running at around 2 GHz would consume about 40 watts of power. This is far less than the 115 watts consumed by the fastest versions of the Pentium 4.
Intel has Yonahs listed as X20/30/40 and 50 at unlisted clocks. That is because the company doesn't know exactly how well they are going to bin out yet. A 2.5 GHz frequency is the object, but variations both higher and lower that value is possible. The four versions Intel has planned could look something like the X50 running at 2.5GHz, X40 at 2.33, X30 at 2.17 and the lowly X20 at a 2.0GHz frequency. The FSB will be 667MHz.
The Yonah will be a dual core part with 2MB of shared L2 cache. On batteries one core turns off, and the other gets all the cache. The company wants it to be as multimedia friendly as possible for it has the full compliment of SSE1/2/3 on board. Instructions have been improved for lower latency and better performance.
Does al this mean that AMD's Turion should tremble with fear? AMD has refused to release exact technical details of the processor, but it said notebooks featuring the new chip will appear in the first half of 2005. Each Intel core should be at least on par with a similarly clocked A64, and Yonah has two of them. So if AMD didn't have Taylor on the map, which should be competitive, sporting power numbers a little lower than Yonah, they'd be in big trouble