Intel’s Pentium 2200A/2000A MHz
AMD’s Athlon XP2000+
It’s a big day today for the two processor giants; both are introducing their
latest and fastest weapons against each other. Both companies are participating
in the same race and are driving for the same prize; they are racing to deliver
the fastest and most powerful x86 processor.
Our AMD Athlon XP2000+ sample didn’t make it in time in the lab for the testing
which will unfortunately focus this review mostly into Intel’s latest flagship,
although the XP2000 was late arriving, we will have a full indepth review
as soon as possible
The new face of the Pentium 4: Northwood
Today Intel publicly introduced their latest and fastest 2200MHz and 2000MHz
processors; these two new parts are based on Intel’s new Northwood core and
are therefore called 2200A and 2000A. Notice the addition of the A at the
end; this refers to the processor being based on Northwood. To some this will bring back memories
of the first celerons with the famous (infamous?) 300A, and the pentium III
which used the 'E' and 'B' to denote 133mhz fsb and the .18mu coppermine cores.
Pentium 4 processors based on the Northwood core are built on the latest 0.13
micron fabrication process using copper interconnects.
| |
Core
|
Number
of transistors
|
L2
Cache
|
Die
Size
|
|
Pentium 4 2200A
|
Northwood
|
55
M
|
512K
|
146mm2
|
|
Pentium 4 2000
|
Willamette
|
42
M
|
256K
|
217mm2
|
|
Athlon XP 2000+
|
Palomino
|
37.5
M
|
256K
|
128mm2
|
The Northwood is manufactured using
300mm wide silicon disks compared to the 200mm wide disks used for the Willamette
core. This new manufacturing process gives the wafer more than half the space
of the Willamette's wafer surface and in result doubles the number of processor
dies. In addition, Intel can now produce up to 300% more processors from the
same wafer because of smaller conducting tracks of the 0.13 process.
The transition to the 0.13 process has several benefits on the present and future
of Intel's flagship, one important being the lower power consumption. The Northwood
runs at 1.5V compared to Willamette's which runs on 1.75V, the lower voltage
operation will allow the Northwood core to consume less power and in result
run cooler.
Another major enhancement on the Northwood is the level two cache memory
bump; it doubles from the original 256K on the Willamette to 512K on the Northwood core. Both
Northwood and Willamette uses the same 8-way associative L2
Cache. The extra L2 memory is definitely a welcome addition which should boost
in average an extra 5 – 10% of performance in most tasks.
New Micro
Architecture "NetBurst"
NetBurst is the name for
Intel's new microprocessor architecture. In order to maintain the stability
in the fast growing processor market, every 3 - 4 years Intel’s develops totally
new microprocessor architecture. The last architecture Intel released was
the P6 Micro Architecture, first introduced with the Pentium Pro back in 1995.
The
P6 architecture was a great design until we reached the 1GHz mark at which
point this design was pushing its limits on reaching higher peaks. You might
remember the famous Pentium III 1.13GHz recall that took place last August.
The reason behind this was simple, Intel pushed the P6 design to far and stability
problems immediately began.
In November 2000, Intel officially launched their newest Architecture named
NetBurst; this was introduced with the launch of the Pentium 4 processor,
the first ever IA-32 processor to take advantage of it. NetBurst includes
the fallowing innovations.
