Intel Monday announced the Q1 ’04 availability of four new Pentium 4 processors, formerly codenamed Prescott.
The processors are noted for being built on Intel’s new 90nm processing technology and incorporate low-power transistors, strained silicon, and a new low-k dielectric material.
The four new processors continue Intel’s line of Hyper-Threading processors and feature an 800MHz FSB, a new 31-stage pipeline named NetBurst and a larger 1MB L2 cache.
The move to a 1MB L2 cache doubles the cache size from the Northwood P4 Extreme Edition (EE) chips manufactured with a 130nm technology. The die size has also shrunk from 237mm2 to 112mm2.
Where the P4EE’s L1 cache is 8KB, the new Prescott P4s have a 16KB L1 cache.
The Prescott also adds 13 new instructions: an instruction that speeds up x87 floating point to integer conversion; two instructions that aid Hyper-Threading by managing thread synchronization, four instructions for handling structure arrays in 3D graphics, five instructions to improve the loading, moving and duplicating of SIMD data and an instruction that improves video data by avoid cache line splits when data is loaded.
The new 3.40GHz Prescott P4 uses Intel’s 675 and 665 chipsets and is priced at $417 in 1,000-unit quantities.
The 3.20GHz, 3.0GHz and 2.80GHz Prescott P4s all use Intel’s 875 and 865 chipsets and are priced at $278, $218 and $178, respectively, in 1000-unit quantities.
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