Yonah notebook prototype spotted: 1.47 GHz dual core, 945GM

[K. Eng]

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=428812

There are very interesting pictures:
Picture 1 shows what looks like a 14 or 15" widecreen chasis. Note the digital camera integrated into the top of the display housing.
Picture 2 shows the Windows Task manager and CPU-Z identification results. Note the clock speed (1.47 GHz), core type (P6), and addition of SSE3 instructions.
The last two pictures show some system info, including the presence of two CPUs and the 945GM Express chipset.

It looks to me like this product is almost ready to roll... I am getting impatient. It's been more than a year since the Dothan launch, and according to Intel roadmaps, Yonah is still a bit more than 5 months away.

Edit - I'm hoping that AMD launches a dual-core Turion or Mobile Athlon 64 soon. That will force Intel to respond with a Yonah launch.

[AlphaKilo470]

Edit - I'm hoping that AMD launches a dual-core Turion or Mobile Athlon 64 soon. That will force Intel to respond with a Yonah launch.

Yes but remember what happened the last few times Intel rushed a launch. The Pentium, launched in 1993 so Intel could keep from being dominated by the PowerPC was originally ran very hot and was rather buggy in the FPU. Next up was the Pentium III 550 and 600 (Katmai) that were also very buggy and hot. Then we have one of the biggest Intel blunders, the i810 and i820 chipsets. Anyone who bought a Pentium III computer in 2000 or early 2001 won't need me to explain the i810 or i820. There have been more market driven Intel blunders like the Celeron 266 and origianl Celeron 300 (not to be confused with the A model which was regarded as the best overcloking CPU ever) but those few came off the top of my head fastest.

[K. Eng]

Yes but remember what happened the last few times Intel rushed a launch. The Pentium, launched in 1993 so Intel could keep from being dominated by the PowerPC was originally ran very hot and was rather buggy in the FPU.

That is untrue. An Intel engineer thought he could save die space by omitting certain parts of a division table in the P5 FPU. That is what caused the FDIV bug. Ironically, the omission didn't even save any die space in the end. That was idiocy, not rushing.

Next up was the Pentium III 550 and 600 (Katmai) that were also very buggy and hot.

I cannot recall any hardware site, whether it be AnandTech, THG, Sharkyextreme, or any magazine that reported stability problems with the 500 and 600 MHz Katmai parts. The 1.13 GHz Coppermine comes to mind but that was about a year later.

Then we have one of the biggest Intel blunders, the i810 and i820 chipsets. Anyone who bought a Pentium III computer in 2000 or early 2001 won't need me to explain the i810 or i820.

There was nothing wrong with the i810 chipset. The i810 was actually pretty good -- when I was still in college we had hundreds of i810 systems deployed and they were good for everything except games (due to the lousy, but adequate integrated graphics).

The i820 was admittedly buggy as hell initially, and the MHT SDRAM/RDRAM converter absolutely sucked, but the bad i820 chips never made it into consumer's hands.

There have been more market driven Intel blunders like the Celeron 266 and origianl Celeron 300 (not to be confused with the A model which was regarded as the best overcloking CPU ever) but those few came off the top of my head fastest.

And the cacheless Celeron was fine for simple business tasks.

Intel has tended to screw up when it pushed the boundaries too far... the FDIV bug was the result of trying to save a tiny bit of die space. The 1.13 GHz coppermine P3 was the result of pushing the frequency on the P6 core a bit to much. The i820 disaster was the result of rushing to market with a radically new memory technology.

I honestly don't think Yonah fits the description of pushing boundaries too far. Sure, it is dual core, which is a first for Intel on the mobile platform, but there are not any radically new technologies hereand it does not seem that the chip is meant to push the performance curve to the very edge of heat dissipation and sanity!

Intel said in yesterday's press release that Yonah was sampling. Generally from 'sampling' to 'shipping product' is about 3 months, or so the experts tell me.

My guess is that Intel is holding back on the launch in order to ensure large volumes of availability when the product is officially announced.

[emorphien]

Looks very promising. I'm curious how single task performance will be with 1.47 Ghz cores. Multitasking or any efficiently multithreaded application ought to scream, but I suspect in some things there will be no gains and maybe even performance hits.

Overall I bet it'll be a very interesting and solid performer when it does arrive in the next 20 years

[AlphaKilo470]

{in response to the last post by K}
Not per say K. You make a few good points but miss a few facts but nonetheless, I really don't feel like dragging out any more arguments. My original point was that when someone does a rush product launch, we can win OR lose and the arguments with which I used to convey were taken too far out of proportion.

[K. Eng]

I agree with you there. My guess is just that the factors that lead to a rush launch being disastrous aren't present in the Yonah project.

{in response to the last post by K}
My original point was that when someone does a rush product launch, we can win OR lose and the arguments with which I used to convey were taken too far out of proportion.