![[AskAboutComputers.com]](logo_com_305x118.gif){kind=logo}
Tid-bits
12/1 - There's an article on Yonah at AnandTech, by Anand. Yonah the chip, not the biblical character. Yonah, the successor to Dothan, the successor of Banias, the first Centrino microprocessor.
Yonah is an important chip, for reasons besides replacing the current generation Pentium M (Dothan). The technology of Yonah shall become the basis for much of Intel's desktop and server lines as well. It's "a predictor of the performance of Intel’s next-generation desktop micro-architecture".
The article takes a pre-release sample of Yonah and drops it into a desktop motherboard and benchmarks it against the current crop of desktop motherboards, including an identically clocked Athlon 64 X2, the current performance leader. Don't ask me how they got their hands on a pre-release sample of Yonah, or a motherboard to put it in.
Yonah has a shared cache, not a split cache, unlike Smithfield, the current desktop Pentium D. This means that Yonah is a unified processor. One of the criticisms of the Pentium D is that it is two discrete CPUs hastily slapped together on a single die. Shared cache vs. split cache "is a very important distinction, as it means that Yonah is far from just two Dothans stuck together".
Yonah shines in power management, under full load. It is able to achieve comparable performance to desktop CPUs without the benefit of an on-die memory controller, which AMD CPUs use to such effect. "Intel is able to achieve that level of performance, without an on-die memory controller".