The Yonah socket is still a 479-pin interface, however the pin-out has been changed once more, and of course Yonah won’t even physically fit into any current Pentium M motherboards. Instead, you’ll need a brand new motherboard with a brand new chipset. So if you invested in any of the handful of desktop Pentium M motherboards that were released over the past year, you’re unfortunately out of luck.
Yonah (left) vs. Dothan (right) - Note the different pin-out
Obviously the biggest improvement Yonah offers over Dothan is the fact that it’s dual core. But where things get interesting is that thanks to Yonah’s 65nm process, a dual core Yonah die is about the same size as a single core Dothan die - in other words, it costs Intel just as much to make a dual core Yonah, as it did for them to make a single core Dothan.
A major reason the die size didn’t really go up much is because although Yonah has two cores, its L2 cache size remains unchanged at 2MB. Unlike the Pentium D, Yonah’s 2MB L2 cache is not split into two discrete 1MB caches, it is actually one whole 2MB cache that is shared by both cores. This is a very important distinction, as it means that Yonah is far from just two Dothans stuck together.
At 2.0GHz, Yonah is basically equal to, if not slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed in virtually all of the tests we ran. The important distinction here is that Intel is able to achieve that level of performance, without an on-die memory controller. But there is also one more thing to note, Yonah can offer that level of performance with significantly lower power consumption:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627
Yonah (left) vs. Dothan (right) - Note the different pin-out
Obviously the biggest improvement Yonah offers over Dothan is the fact that it’s dual core. But where things get interesting is that thanks to Yonah’s 65nm process, a dual core Yonah die is about the same size as a single core Dothan die - in other words, it costs Intel just as much to make a dual core Yonah, as it did for them to make a single core Dothan.
A major reason the die size didn’t really go up much is because although Yonah has two cores, its L2 cache size remains unchanged at 2MB. Unlike the Pentium D, Yonah’s 2MB L2 cache is not split into two discrete 1MB caches, it is actually one whole 2MB cache that is shared by both cores. This is a very important distinction, as it means that Yonah is far from just two Dothans stuck together.
At 2.0GHz, Yonah is basically equal to, if not slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed in virtually all of the tests we ran. The important distinction here is that Intel is able to achieve that level of performance, without an on-die memory controller. But there is also one more thing to note, Yonah can offer that level of performance with significantly lower power consumption:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627
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