- Joined
- Feb 19, 2003
- Location
- New York
Intel pulled the plug on its Tejas core last week, leaving questions to flourish; will the new socket LGA775 Pentium processor still be released? Why was Tejas canned? Are the road maps we've been following worth the pixels their printed with?
While I won't claim to have a bug underneath the 4th floor conference table in Intel's Santa Clara offices, I have been able to gather a little information about the whole CPU-switcheroo. As you know, Intel had planned on moving from socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs to a pinless socket 775 Pentium 4 CPU. What you might not have known is that two cores were planned for the new LGA775 package; "Prescott FMB2" and "Tejas FMB1." The latter was dropped, so Intel will still be going ahead with Prescott FMB2 for socket 775, some time around Q1 2005 by all estimates.
According to PCstats sources, the 1066MHz FSB Tejas core (with 2MB L2 cache!) was cancelled for a couple of reasons; for starters, in spite of a 0.90 micron manufacturing process, Tejas simply ran too hot - estimated between 120W-150W! At that wattage, the thermal solution becomes quite critical... Additionally, with the recent movement by Intel away from Gigahertz-oriented product marketing, the focus now sits with CPU performance and power consumption. Thus, a more efficient dual-core Pentium M processor has been chosen for the desktop platform.
While we're not entirely certain of this, the other rumour was that Tejas wasn't providing any significant performance advantages over today's crop of Prescott cores. Add that all up, and you have a processor core which was too hot, not powerful enough, and conflicting with Intel's new marketing strategy. Still, with the upcoming Intel chipset releases, BTX, DDR-2 and PCI Express, socket 775 is still on its way. Manufacturers I've spoken with tell me they are expecting socket 775 to bring about some much needed momentum to the entire PC industry.
While I won't claim to have a bug underneath the 4th floor conference table in Intel's Santa Clara offices, I have been able to gather a little information about the whole CPU-switcheroo. As you know, Intel had planned on moving from socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs to a pinless socket 775 Pentium 4 CPU. What you might not have known is that two cores were planned for the new LGA775 package; "Prescott FMB2" and "Tejas FMB1." The latter was dropped, so Intel will still be going ahead with Prescott FMB2 for socket 775, some time around Q1 2005 by all estimates.
According to PCstats sources, the 1066MHz FSB Tejas core (with 2MB L2 cache!) was cancelled for a couple of reasons; for starters, in spite of a 0.90 micron manufacturing process, Tejas simply ran too hot - estimated between 120W-150W! At that wattage, the thermal solution becomes quite critical... Additionally, with the recent movement by Intel away from Gigahertz-oriented product marketing, the focus now sits with CPU performance and power consumption. Thus, a more efficient dual-core Pentium M processor has been chosen for the desktop platform.
While we're not entirely certain of this, the other rumour was that Tejas wasn't providing any significant performance advantages over today's crop of Prescott cores. Add that all up, and you have a processor core which was too hot, not powerful enough, and conflicting with Intel's new marketing strategy. Still, with the upcoming Intel chipset releases, BTX, DDR-2 and PCI Express, socket 775 is still on its way. Manufacturers I've spoken with tell me they are expecting socket 775 to bring about some much needed momentum to the entire PC industry.
