Intel readies Extreme Home chips

IT'S MONDAY and so it's Intel code name day, not washing day like Monday always was in the old days. Put down your breakfast and pay attention because these are some juicy mid-range home chip names ahead. By now, you are positively shivering with excitement and experiencing widespread horripilation.

Let's start out with the high end, or Extreme Gaming as Intel calls it, and that is just as Extreme as the Jell-O. Today's Extreme name is Kentsfield XE, the Extreme chip to follow Presler XE. Look for this baby in mid-2007, probably Conroe based.

Moving to a lower and far less extreme chip, is the sucessor to Conroe called Ridgefield. This one looks to be the 45 nanometre shrink of Conroe. It's slated to bump the cache from 4MB to 6MB, and up the front side bus (FSB) to 1333MHz. Not Extreme, but tasty anyway. Let's just call it the Wild Strawberry Jell-O of Intel's 2007 lineup.

Going a little further down on the totem pole of gelatinous codenames, we'll see Allendale and Wolfdale. Allendale is the follow up to Cedar Mill, the single core 65 nanometre Pentium 4. It is basically a castrated Conroe with two cores, less bus speed, less cache, less speed, and no power savings. Wolfdale is the 45 nanometre shrink, and it adds cache, adds bus bandwidth and ups frequency, but isn't Extreme, or even where Conroe was.

The interesting part about the 'dales is that they occupy a fourth niche. It seems Intel is about to create a class of chips between the P4 and Celeron classes. Before, these chips were just a downclocked version of the P4, but soon they will be single core variants of the dual cores. Then they will move to a separate core, or possibly a fused off 'normal' core. Either way, these are the plain strawberry version of the Jell-O road map.

Moving right into the ghetto of the Intel roadmap, we will see Millville, the 2007 Celeron. Think slow, single core, anaemic bus, missing features aplenty and a 'value cache'. This is the lime Jell-O of the CPU world. A warm, slightly runny lime Jell-O.

These are currantly {geddit? Ed.] all the new code names you need to know to complete your home Intel road map. There will be a quiz, and for extra credit, the most poignant letter about what X-Treme Jell-O means to you will win nothing at all, but may get a letter posted. Bonus points if you work the names Gelsinger and Nehalem into the e-missive. µ