We're well into Day 2 of Comdex here in Las Vegas and we had to take time out from our very busy schedule to report on some interesting findings about future Intel and AMD CPUs.

Intel's Prescott intro at > 3.2GHz

Looking at Intel's CPU roadmap, it's interesting to note that Intel will not be scaling clock speeds next year as rapidly as they did in 2002. This makes a lot of sense considering how hot the new 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is running. Intel's current roadmap shows them not breaking the 3.06GHz barrier until the second quarter with the 3.2GHz Pentium 4. The last two quarters of 2003 are currently listed as > 3.20GHz and > 3.40GHz, mostly because Intel isn't exactly sure how high they can push their 0.13-micron Northwood cores.

The relatively slow (compared to this year) clock speed ramp next year gives AMD a chance to regain some of their lost performance ground. The slow clockspeed ramp also puts pressure on Intel to introduce their 90nm Prescott core as soon as possible, however currently it is scheduled for a Q4 2003 release.

According to Intel's latest roadmap (current as of last Friday), Prescott will debut at least at 3.20GHz and will be made available with a 1MB L2 cache.

In order to make up for a lack of clock speed improvements, Intel will be introducing the 800MHz FSB (200MHz quad-pumped) on the 0.13-micron Northwood Pentium 4 processors before Prescott's release. The release will happen in Q2 2003 and instead of offering higher speed CPUs, Intel will go back and offer 800MHz FSB versions of CPUs as slow as 2.4GHz. These new 800MHz CPUs will also have Hyper-Threading support, which should make them very attractive purchases. Prescott will obviously support the 800MHz FSB as well.

Intel's 800MHz FSB & AMD's 400MHz FSB

Obviously to take advantage of the new 800MHz FSB, Intel will be releasing new chipsets. We mentioned yesterday that Springdale would be the chipset to provide 800MHz FSB support but now we've got much more accurate information on exactly where things stand:

What you should take away from this table is that all of Intel's mainstream chipsets by the end of Q2 2003 will be Dual Channel DDR solutions. The 845E may actually take over the entry-level segment as it has a much lower pin-count than 845PE and 845GE, but for everything else there's dual channel DDR.

As you can see here, Canterwood will be the replacement chipset for the 850E - not Springdale. Springdale-PE will be an excellent performer but apparently Canterwood's "turbo mode" means that it is highly optimized for DDR400 performance and should yield noticeably higher performance than Springdale-PE.

The Springdale-G with integrated graphics does not seem to have a new graphics core although most are calling it "updated." The only reason there is to call it updated is that it now has a wider memory bus courtesy of the dual channel DDR. There may be some minor tweaks to the core but we see no indication of major changes.

Once again, all of these chipsets will be available in Q2 next year.

Today AMD announced the name of their ClawHammer processor - Athlon 64. At the same keynote they had nForce2 motherboards running with a 400MHz FSB. We just received confirmation (although AMD won't announce it until much later) that Barton will be shipping with a 400MHz FSB and the performance boost from the new FSB is pretty healthy. On current processors the use of a 400MHz FSB will improve performance anywhere from 0 - 15% on the nForce2 platform, obviously depending on the benchmark.

We also received full confirmation that VIA's KT400A will in fact be a dual channel DDR solution. The boards should be ready in January and we'll be able to see if VIA has what it takes to out-tweak NVIDIA.

Athlon 64 Running Smoothly @ 1.4GHz

Yesterday we reported that the Athlon 64 samples at Comdex were running at 1.4GHz, today we were able to spend a little more time with those systems and even got some feel for its performance.

The first thing to point out is that AMD's chipset is currently not running AGP 8X with much stability, unfortunately that also means that other chipset vendors that borrowed AMD's 8X design are having issues as well. On the bright side, NVIDIA's CK8 chipset is working just fine with AGP 8X enabled.

Click to Enlarge

The system we played around with was running AMD's own Athlon 64 chipset but obviously in AGP 4X mode. The heatsink was lukewarm at best while the system was running 3DMark 2001 SE, clearly a testament to how beneficial Silicon on Insulator is. The system was quite stable and never crashed while we were using it; it was running a regular copy of Windows XP Professional.

Click to Enlarge

The performance of the Athlon 64 at 1.4GHz was around the speed of a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2200+, at least in the 3DMark tests we ran. Obviously this isn't an indication of final performance but it does give you an idea of where AMD is headed. If they can reach the 2.0GHz clock speeds they are shooting for then the Athlon 64 could be quite a competitive part. Judging by the stability of the system we played with, AMD's only issue right now is getting clock speeds up. Coming from 800MHz at Computex to 1.4GHz today, AMD is getting there but they've still got a long road ahead.

Final Words

That's all for now, be sure to check back later for more show coverage and sign up for our Newsletter to get all of the updates as soon as we get them.