More details on Prescott processors and the Grantsdale family

As you know, Prescott´s crystal size will make 109.1mm² instead of Northwood´s 131.4mm² due to 90nm process instead of the 0.13µm technology. This time the company won´t have to change the wafer size like it had to do while transiting to 0.13µm process (from 200mm to 300mm wafers). Prescott clock speeds will start from 3.4GHz to reach 4GHz in 2004. According to provisional estimations, Tejas chips will be launched in Q4 2004 with 4.4GHz+ clock speeds. By that time Prescott might reach 4.0-4.2GHz.

As for the Grantsdale solutions expected in Q2 2004 with DDR2-400/533 and DDR333/400 support, the most powerful discrete Grantsdale-P would likely support DDR2 only, while integrated Grantsdale-G will support both DDR2, and DDR. Of course, the market will se the mainstream Prescotts as well — Grantsdale-GV and Grantsdale-GL — without 533MHz FSB support. These are expected closer to Q3 2004. Grantsdale-GV won´t support external graphics despite the PCI Express x16 slot (unlike AGP, PCI Express x16 is not dedicated to graphics only). Grantsdale-GL won´t support Hyper-Threading and PCI Express x16, just PCI Express x1. By the way, the new Northway Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) chip will work with PCI Express x1. According to provisional information, the whole Grantsdale family will support up to 4Gb of memory.

Below is the summary for Grantsdale-P/G chipsets:

Grantsdale Northbridge

• 533/800MHz FSB (up to 1066MHz when Tejas is released)
• LGA775 package
• PCI Express x16
• Dual-channel DDR2-400/533 and DDR333/400
• Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 3 (DirectX9, Pixel Shader 2.0) in the "G" model

Southbridge ICH6/ICH6R

• 4 x PCI Express x1 ports
• Inegrated Azalia sound (24bit/192kHz)
• 1 x PATA100 channel
• 4 x SATA150 ports
• 8 x USB 2.0 ports
• 6 x PCI slots

Source: PC Watch

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