Intel’s Roadmaps Reveal Conroe Clock Speeds & Information

Intel is convinced that by the end of this year it will have turned the tables on AMD; with Conroe, Merom, and Woodcrest, Intel fully expects to regain the performance crown while offering much lower power consumption than their present-day CPUs. While I’m expecting Intel to do well, it’s hard to say for sure whether it’ll achieve its ultimate goal. Of course, if you ask Intel, it has had the world’s fastest processors for the past five years straight. Regardless, it’s about time for a processor roadmap update, and luckily I have one right here.

As you can guess, Intel is phasing out the Pentium brand and replacing it with its new Core brand. We first saw this on the mobile side with the Core Duo and Core Solo CPUs, and we’ll see it again this fall with some derivative of the Core name on the desktop. What we’ve all known as Conroe for a while now will eventually be called the Core something E6000 or E4000. The E6000 and E4000 break down as follows:

Processor Number	Clock Speed	FSB	L2 Cache
E6700	2.66GHz	1,066MHz	4MB
E6600	2.40GHz	1,066MHz	4MB
E6400	2.13GHz	1,066MHz	2MB
E6300	1.86GHz	1,066MHz	2MB
E4200	1.60GHz	800MHz	2MB

With the latest roadmaps, we finally have an indication of clock speeds for Intel’s new architecture. Remember that Conroe has a deeper pipe than Yonah, thus allowing it to reach higher clock speeds, but the decrease in efficiency is most likely more than made up for by architecture changes (such as the four-issue core).

The increase in L2 cache on the higher-end parts will also prove to be beneficial to performance, especially considering that these parts still lack an on-die memory controller. I’ve already seen that Yonah can perform, clock for clock, very similarly to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2, so I’d expect Conroe to do no less. The larger L2 cache on Conroe also explains why Yonah’s L2 access latency went up from 10 cycles in Dothan to 14 cycles; it seems as though Yonah’s L2 cache is a 2MB version of the 4MB cache we’ll see later this year in Conroe (and in Merom on the mobile side).

The other key aspect of Conroe is its higher FSB frequency, from 667MHz in Yonah up to 800/1,066MHz. More FSB bandwidth will help keep those larger caches full and help in multitasking scenarios where both cores are active.

Note that all of the Conroe E6000 and E4000 CPUs are still LGA-775, meaning they should work in current 975X-based motherboards. Of course the 975X chipset is still a high-end solution; Intel will release the G965 and P965 chipsets for the mainstream market alongside the new processors. The G965/P965 solutions will both support DDR2-800 and a 1,066MHz FSB, so they will be able to run the full gamut of Conroe E6000/E4000 CPUs.

Interestingly enough, there will be a Xeon based on Woodcrest (the server version of Conroe) clocked at 3.0GHz with a 1,333MHz FSB released sometime in the third quarter of this year, as well. Given Intel’s prior history of turning Xeons into Extreme Edition processors, we may very well see a 3.0GHz Core Extreme Edition processor on the desktop later this year.

With Core Duo still taking its sweet time to get out into the mainstream market, it’s no surprise that Merom (Yonah’s successor) won’t be out until the fourth quarter of this year. It’s quite possible that Merom gets pushed off into early 2007 to give Core Duo a reasonable lifespan. The details on Merom are as follows:

Processor Number	Clock Speed	FSB	L2 Cache
T7600	2.33GHz	667MHz	4MB
T7400	2.16GHz	667MHz	4MB
T7200	2.0GHz	667MHz	4MB
T5600	1.83GHz	667MHz	2MB

Architecturally, Merom should be very similar to Conroe, and Intel is talking about including a new set of SIMD instructions with the new chips (currently called Enhanced Processor SSE, maybe SSE4 in the future). Merom is slated to debut on Core Duo’s Napa platform but will receive its own brand-new chipset and wireless solution (the Santa Rosa platform) in early 2007.