Intel Dothan desktop mobo :)

[pascal]

Info from the inquirer: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15976

The japanese site: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20040515/etc_pd41pm.html

I want one. I want one. I want one 8)

 

[Natoma]

Interesting. I wonder when Intel is moving back to the P3 architecture en masse.....

My friend must feel pretty shattered. He worked on the Willamette core and Netburst was his baby. He didn't create it, but he was one of the primary engineers working on it. Also happened to be one of the better Quake 2 players. Any of you remember TULL or Bzkr from back in the day? Minator may ring a bell.

Anyway, I remember when he was touting the Willamette core as the next greatest thing, sure to destroy anything and everything that existed at the time. Of course I'm sure he didn't forsee the Athlon, but hey. No one did.

Anyway, I'm mostly interested in the low wattage of these chips. Near the same performance of a P4 3.2Ghz, but with 1/3rd the wattage output. Mmmm time to cut down on the system fans.

 

[anaqer]

I want one. I want one. I want one 8)

Hey, that's my line!

 

[Killer-Kris]

So now what I'm curious of is where do you find the chips to put in this motherboard? From my understanding not only do no retailers sell dothans, but they are also made in a fashion such that they are soldered to the boards. All these "desktop dothan" motherboards have sockets so that leaves me a little bit confused.

 

[mczak]

So now what I'm curious of is where do you find the chips to put in this motherboard? From my understanding not only do no retailers sell dothans, but they are also made in a fashion such that they are soldered to the boards. All these "desktop dothan" motherboards have sockets so that leaves me a little bit confused.

Pentium-M cpus are available both as micro-PGA (Pin Grid Array) and micro-BGA (Ball Grid Array - that's the soldered version..). Currently Dothans are ONLY available as PGA (makes sense - there are no ULV / LV versions yet neither, the slower/lower power the cpu is, the more likely it is used in a really small device which doesn't have room for a socket).
There are some vendors which sell Pentium-M chips, the cpus are not cheap though. AFAIK the ones you can buy are always PGA (well you'd have REAL trouble to solder that micro-bga-479 thing to a socket ). And you can even get boxed ones, so this obviously isn't grey market stuff. Maybe the vendors don't carry Dothans yet, haven't checked.

 

[Killer-Kris]

So now what I'm curious of is where do you find the chips to put in this motherboard? From my understanding not only do no retailers sell dothans, but they are also made in a fashion such that they are soldered to the boards. All these "desktop dothan" motherboards have sockets so that leaves me a little bit confused.

Pentium-M cpus are available both as micro-PGA (Pin Grid Array) and micro-BGA (Ball Grid Array - that's the soldered version..). Currently Dothans are ONLY available as PGA (makes sense - there are no ULV / LV versions yet neither, the slower/lower power the cpu is, the more likely it is used in a really small device which doesn't have room for a socket).
There are some vendors which sell Pentium-M chips, the cpus are not cheap though. AFAIK the ones you can buy are always PGA (well you'd have REAL trouble to solder that micro-bga-479 thing to a socket ). And you can even get boxed ones, so this obviously isn't grey market stuff. Maybe the vendors don't carry Dothans yet, haven't checked.

Ahh thank you very much, yeah for some reason I guess I got the mistaken idea that all notebook processors were soldered into the boards.

In light of my recent enlightenment I sure hope some websight with money manages to get their hands on a board and processor and gives us a review. Or better yet Asus, Abit, MSI, and company all decide to follow and release similar boards. That should help bring the prices down on all the components.

 

[ANova]

This + 2.0 GHz Pentium M =

 

[pascal]

Interesting. I wonder when Intel is moving back to the P3 architecture en masse.....

Rumours are for somewhere 2005 with Pentium-M based desktops chips. Probably higher clock frequency and FSB. Maybe dual core 8)

Before that during 2004 we will see some 533MHz FSB Pentium-M.

 

[Fox5]

Interesting. I wonder when Intel is moving back to the P3 architecture en masse.....

My friend must feel pretty shattered. He worked on the Willamette core and Netburst was his baby. He didn't create it, but he was one of the primary engineers working on it. Also happened to be one of the better Quake 2 players. Any of you remember TULL or Bzkr from back in the day? Minator may ring a bell.

Anyway, I remember when he was touting the Willamette core as the next greatest thing, sure to destroy anything and everything that existed at the time. Of course I'm sure he didn't forsee the Athlon, but hey. No one did.

Anyway, I'm mostly interested in the low wattage of these chips. Near the same performance of a P4 3.2Ghz, but with 1/3rd the wattage output. Mmmm time to cut down on the system fans.

Early willamettes lost to p3s too, so I don't see how he could have such a high opinion of willamette itself....
Though I suppose without the athlon(and ignoring the p3), then no, a sped up k6 or any cyrix cpu could not come close to the levels willamette reached. And g5 wasn't even around.....g4 may have competed though, except it was at like 500 mhz when willamette was at 2ghz.

BTW, dothan doesn't seem like a performance contender for athlon 64 or pentium 4 until intel gets out a dual core version. Assuming it performs clock for clock with athlon 64, it doesn't seem to scale quite as well(or at least hasn't yet), and the p4s so far will outperform any pentium m(the high end p4s anyhow), and I think it will continue so to about 4ghz, in which time intel will probably dump the p4 core. And dual core dothans will have more raw power than an athlon 64, but it won't be at least until 2006 or 2007 that we see a mass rollout of programs even supporting dual core cpus, when it's a 3ghz athlon 64(in 64 bit mode) versus a dual core 2.2ghz dothan, who wins?(hopefully the consumers, expect amd pricecs to skyrocket if intel doesn't have anything to compete with them)

 

[pascal]

Dothan dont need to be as fast as the fastest P4 or Athlon. Just be 90% as fast with only 1/3 of the heat generation

Probably we will see some 2.2 ~ 2.4GHz 533FSB Dothan in the near future. This should be very fast 8)

 

[Tim Murray]

Dothan dont need to be as fast as the fastest P4 or Athlon. Just be 90% as fast with only 1/3 of the heat generation

Probably we will see some 2.2 ~ 2.4GHz 533FSB Dothan in the near future. This should be very fast 8)

I wonder how much you could overclock them... Slap a Thermalright cooler on there (heavily modded so it will fit), a Vantec Tornado (or better yet, watercooling and/or Prometeia), and VOILA. 3Ghz P-M. :O

 

[Fox5]

Dothan dont need to be as fast as the fastest P4 or Athlon. Just be 90% as fast with only 1/3 of the heat generation

Probably we will see some 2.2 ~ 2.4GHz 533FSB Dothan in the near future. This should be very fast 8)

Does it really generate 1/3 the heat of an athlon 64 at the same performance? How about a mobile athlon 64? As far as I was aware, the mobile athlon 64 was about equal to the centrino in power consumption and heat generation at the same performance level.

And mhz per mhz, does centrino = athlon xp or athlon 64?

 

[Saem]

I don't think it'd be that hard for Intel to make a revision of Dothan, which will basically cut down on some of the implementation decisions made due to power consumption and trade that off for a bit more umpf and clock rate scalling headroom. You'd loose some of the power advantage, but the performance advantage would be VERY worth it.

 

[pascal]

Dothan dont need to be as fast as the fastest P4 or Athlon. Just be 90% as fast with only 1/3 of the heat generation

Probably we will see some 2.2 ~ 2.4GHz 533FSB Dothan in the near future. This should be very fast 8)

Does it really generate 1/3 the heat of an athlon 64 at the same performance? How about a mobile athlon 64? As far as I was aware, the mobile athlon 64 was about equal to the centrino in power consumption and heat generation at the same performance level.

And mhz per mhz, does centrino = athlon xp or athlon 64?

The Dothan 2GHz thermal design is for 21W. I dont know about the Athlon 64 but it is probably +50W. Have to check

 

[Fox5]

That's lower than current pentium m's then, at right now at 1.7ghz they consume 24.5W, and the mobile pentium 4's at 2.4ghz consume 30W and 2.5 is 35W. The desktop replacements range from 60W to 76W.
For what I guess are desktop replacecment chips, athlon 64 does 62W, however the new mobile chips at 1.6ghz do 35W.

Now, assuming dothan does at 2ghz what the current pentium m's do at 1.7 ghz, then dothan will be at 24.5W at 2ghz. However, do pentium m's perform better than athlon xps? If they only perform as well as athlon xps, that's about a 400mhz difference in performance from an athlon 64, so the 2ghz will perform as well as the 1.6ghz Athlon 64 and have a lower thermal rating. However, 64 bit could give the equivilant of an extra 300mhz, so it would take a dothan at 2.3ghz to match it. The dothan would probably still have a lower thermal rating, but can intel really get up to 2.3ghz before amd can lower their thermal rating? Of course, that's assuming that a pentium m only equals an athlon xp, it might be better.

 

[pascal]

IIRC the 1.6GHz Pentium-M has the performance equivalent to 2.4GHz P4, then my guess the 2GHz Dothan is equivalent to +2.8GHz P4.

Also the Athlon 64 1.6GHz mobile is probably equivalent to the P4 2.4GHz in general terms.

Probably the 2GHz Dotham will be faster in some benchmarks and the Athlon 64 1.6Ghz will have the same performance for FP intensive benchmarks. But the Athlon 64 has a thermal design of 35W and the Dotham is 21W.

 

[pascal]

Comparatif d'Architecture:
http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cpu/dothan/dothan-5.htm

8)

 

[Fox5]

Strange, from what I heard the athlon 64 typically had a 100 to 200mhz advantage over the centrino.
Also, http://www.tekbargains.net/hottips/hottip8/index.cfm
at the chart on this page, it appears the athlon xps even hold up well against the pentium m's.....I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but athlon xps of approximately the same speed as pentium m's score higher a lot of times.

Plus, in the p-m's power consumption, well, athlon 64s do have an integrated memory controller, so their motherboards could possibly require less power, plus the nforce3 boards have reduced the north and south bridges down to a single chip, which I'd think would reduce power consumption even more, how does a centrino + motherboard compare to say an athlon 64 + nforce3?

 

[Rugor]

A couple of points:

I wish the table above gave a bit more information, especially on cache sizes for the various processors. For example, we know the A64-FX has dual-channel memory and 1MB of L2 cache, but we don't know which model of A64 they are using. Is the plain-jane A64 a 3000+ with 512KB of L2 or a 3200+ with 1MB of L2?

Something is giving the FX its huge increase in performance over the non-FX in this test and that's either memory bandwidth or cache size, since the cores have identical functionality otherwise. My own guess is that it's memory bandwidth, since the differing cache sizes on the two P4 models don't appear to have made a significant difference, but I don't know, and it's really hard to justify the behavior of K8 cores based on how Netburst processors react. In fact, the one thing that I come away with from that table is that the test does a poor job of isolating the processor core since we have two processors with the same core at the same speed giving significantly different results.

As to a multicore future, both will do multicores, so the ball is still in the air over that court too.

Still, there's no doubt but that Dothan is powerful.

 

[ANova]

I don't know why they choose to benchmark the chips running at the same frequency. All that tells us is how many IPCs each produces and totally ignores the P4's higher frequencies which compensate for it.

The other set of tests is a good indication though. The Dothan at 2.4 GHz is actually faster then the P4EE and the 3400+ in the majority of the tests. Quite impressive indeed, especially when you consider how little power it consumes.