Hardware Mania has posted an Intel Northwood 2.2GHz preview

In February, Intel will reveal some info about the McKinley core, which may be called as the second generation Itanium series. Operating at 5 GHz., it is built with 0.13 micron Dual-V CMOS technology. Has 32 Bit Integer Execution core with 221 million transistors and more importantly can work at 25°C with only heatsink, no fan. With these specs, McKinley will perform the double of current Itanium series. Also the system bus will be 128bits wide and at 400MHz. The bandwidth will be 6.4 GB/s which is 3 times faster than Itanium. McKinley will have 32K L1, 256K L2 and 3 MB L3. L1 Cache has 1-Cylce latency and compared to L1 Cache’s with 2-3 cycle latency this means an improvement of 15-25%. In addition 256 L2 Cache which has 64GB/s bandwidth, offers four times of the bandwidth that an ordinary RISC processor offers. And the 3 MB L3 cache and the new Cache architecture of McKinley will enhance the performance about 85 percent. Currently this rate is about 75 percent. In short, CPU world will change drastically within a few years.

Another point that is noticeable is that some companies have added Northwoods with 1.6 and 1.8 GHz. corespeed in their pricelists. A friend has asked the technical service of the company and they verified that they were Northwood CPUs with 512KB L2 Cache.

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