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It's Giga Hertz Time
It's hardly more than 48 hours ago that Intel regained the speed crown for the fastest microprocessor with
Northwood Chasing Willamette
Before we will get to the latest developments and ideas of AMD, we should start with the latest Intel stuff, simply because it is shorter, easier to understand and because it is
Right now Intel is shipping samples of future Pentium 4 processors with the 0.13 micron core 'Northwood' to OEMs, at core clocks of 2 and 2.2 GHz. Those samples are of 'A2'-stepping, but running just fine, even though the A2-microcode (that is always used to fix minor processor bugs and usually found in the motherboard's BIOS) is only in beta stage. As we already know, the future 'Northwood' Pentium 4 will have 512 kB second level cache, which is one reason why its performance is superior to that of the current 'Willamette' Pentium 4. The 0.13 micron process ensures a lower power dissipation, so that Northwood will remain cooler than Willamette, at least at clock speeds of 2 and 2.2 GHz.
Northwood's performance advance over Willamette is just enough to equalize the performance loss that you encounter when running Pentium 4 in a
The new Pentium 4 is currently targeted for a release in December 2001, but since times are difficult Intel may release it earlier.
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