Intel prepares to can Pentium 4

IN RETROSPECT, this last IDF played down a lot of things, one of the biggest ones being the Pentium 4. Anything based on the core was played down, all the talk was of the Itanium and Pentium M based devices. In the mobile space, the P-M is the only thing that matters, and Intel is right there. In the server space, all the talk was on Itanium, and this 64 bit Xeon was something barely mentioned in passing.

Luckily, fate will make the Xeon go away, or at least it will merge with the P-M product lines. The next big mobile core is called Merom, and it is not just a tweaked and re-tweaked Banias, it is a completely new core, PM2 for lack of a better way of putting it. Look for big advances there.

Now, the big news that they are not telling you is that there will be a desktop version of this chip, with all the features one would expect out of a desktop chip. Merom is expected to have large changes to it to make it top the last core by 20-30% clock for clock, basically pummel it senseless. When you pull out the power savings bits, and tweak for speed, not watts, you get more, well, speed.

That is Conroe. It is a desktopified Merom, due out in late 2006. It should be on the same bus as Merom, and as we told you about yesterday, the same bus as the Itanium Mark Undecidedasofnow.

It looks like Intel is finally going to get everything on the same page in 2007, Merom, Conroe and Tukwila. If they pull it off, and the performance targets meet what we heard, AMD damn well better execute with the K9. From what everyone is saying at IDF, the attitude inside Intel is now fool us once, shame on you, fool us again, shame on you. Fool us a third time, we will put several key people on the fast track to nowhere, give a massive slap in the fact to the Hillsboro design philosophy, and move on. Move on to Israel that is. µ