Intel confirms Tejas Prescott, Canterwood, Springdale details

LOUIS BURNS, the VP of Intel's desktop CPU unit, disclosed a few more morsels of information about the up-and-coming Prescott as well as its successor, codenamed Tejas, at the forum this morning.

He also confirmed the introduction of Canterwood and Springdale chipsets.

Burns said that the Prescott would have 13 additional instructions, come with 1MB of level two cache, and use an 800MHz front side bus (FSB).

Introduced by our very favourite Intel blonde as the "infamous Mike Magee, who has promised to ask a legitimate question," we instead asked a bastard of a question that got nowhere, fast.

Burns would not disclose what the 13 instructions actually do, but did refer to "usage models" of future PCs in his presentation. As many of those demos related to running other household devices like TVs and handhelds from a desktop, it's pretty fair to infer that's part of what they're for.

In fact, Burns told the INQUIRER we could make up what the 13 extra instructions did, "like we usually do". Yeah, right Louis, that'd be why we told everyone about Canterwood and Springdale months ago..

Canterwood, he said, will support dual channel DDR 400, would come on a four layer motherboard, include Serial ATA natively, and also have Soft RAID built into it. He described Canterwood as an ultimate performance chipset.

Springdale, he said, is a mainstream chipset, will use Extreme Graphics 2, and support CSA. He demonstrated this on a reference platform called Statesboro. The integrated graphics will be at least 30% better than the existing Extreme Graphics support.

Burns also confirmed a "stability programme" for Springdale and Centrino chipsets, which will ensure the same "image" over six quarters. This project is codenamed Granite Peak.

He didn't say a great deal about Prescott's successor, Tejas, except to say that it will support DDR II, arrive inn 2004, will use PCI Express Graphics, and run much cooler and more quietly than current desktop CPUs.

Another codename, Azalea, refers to "better audio" in 2004, and includes Dolby Digital sound, and will provide better speech recognition.

PCs next year will include a new card slot, 3GIO-M, use Clear Water ventilation systems, and support array microphones. This is codenamed Marble Falls.

One of Burns' demos went slightly awry, leading him to say "the gods of the demos" were not with him this day. Sounds faintly heathenish to us..

See Also
More data arrives on Prescott front Slides from a separate presentation