Do you remember the original Pentium 4? It launched at 1.5 GHz and gave us our first bittersweet taste of the NetBurst microarchitecture, which Intel would use to replace the P6 design.When the Pentium 4 began its life, Intel manufactured the chips on a 180 nm node. The 42 million transistors that went into those first Pentium 4s - internally referred to as Willamettes - occupied a die no less than 217 square millimeters. Keep those figures in mind throughout our overview of Intel’s newest mobile processor and platform. And don’t feel too old; eight years seems like a lifetime, when you’re talking tech.
Intel is formally announcing a brand new processor today that it hopes will drive the next generation of mobile Internet devices. Perhaps you’re already familiar with the MID concept. Last year, Intel took the wraps off of its McCaslin platform, a seldom-discussed proof-of-concept that never really took off. Nor was it meant to. McCaslin employed Intel’s A100/A110 processor built on 90nm process technology. Those CPUs were derived from Intel’s Pentium M efforts. And while they enabled respectable compute muscle at 3W, imagine running Windows Vista on an 800 MHz desktop. Or don’t. It’s a painful thought. Nevertheless, the A100 and A110 are x86 Intel chips that go into real products
