IDF Fall 2002: live from Intel Banias press conference, San Jose
Just some hours ago our reporter, Alexandr Medvedev, was at Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, CA. And we present you the currently latest information about Banias processor, undisclosed at the press conference:
- Banias junior model clock rate will be 1.3 GHz
- Chip features over 70 million transistors, mroe than in P4
- Smooth clock rate change supported
- Big and special L2 cache — SRAM memory, so it´s also low-power
- Chip working temperature is not more than 38œC — 40œC at stopped fan (measured by touching the processor)! :-)
- Banias will feature integrated wireless functionality: combined Bluetooth and WiFi. Moreover: as WiFi is dual-range — 802.11a and 802.11b — it won´t conflict and there won´t be speed losses during simultaneous operation due to some technological developments
- Banias supports SSE2!
- Command processing system is also interesting: first microinstructions are gathered, then they are processed together to save power; the chip utilizes special hardware feature similar to a separate cache for the most used stack values. According to Intel, it significantly saves power
- The processor utilizes Microcode Fusion to gather microinstructions into one
- Banias features a high-speed bus, most likely, based on QPB by analogy with P4, optimized to save power
- Banias will have two form-factors: FCPGA and BGA (Surface mount), socket dimensions will resemble Socket 478
- Performance: 1.3 GHz Banias is about two times faster than 1 GHz Mobile PIII (unofficial data, according to MPEG4 encoding test)
- Security: Banias notebooks will feature many means of data security, as the chip offers wireless connectivity. Data will be protected by hardware with a built-in unique private key chip. User will define a password to get a VeriSign certificate for data signing. If a notebook is stolen, thief won´t have all necessary info to hack into without the second part of certificate — user password
- There are chipsets ready for Banias systems: discrete and with built-in graphics (Oden and Montara?)
- Graphics core of integrated chipset will be similar to 845GL, but far more economical
Some other interesting things from IDF:
- They´ve showed Prescott prototype, operating at 4 GHz. It was overclocked (without special cooling) up to 4.7 GHz at which it locked up
- According to Intel, the key trend will be the communications and computing convergence.
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