AT News Update: Centrino and Xeon 2004 Roadmaps

As Q1 begins to draw to a close, we have one more Intel roadmap to add to the mix. You may have already read some of our other Intel and AMD roadmaps from earlier this year. Intel also recently got some attention in our server shootout between Opteron and Gallatin/Prestonia cored Xeons.

We have hinted at Nocona, Potomac, and Jayhawk earlier this year and in other roadmaps. Just as a small refresher, Potomac is the Xeon MP replacement scheduled for Q1 '05. Nocona (for 1P and 2P servers) will show up next quarter, while Nocona's successor (Jayhawk) will show up in 2005. The Pentium M derivatives are based off Intel's Dothan core.

Above you can see we included the $3700 3.0GHz Xeon MP disclosed last week as a placeholder. The biggest news here is Intel's Nocona core, which is slated to start showing up in Q2. Nocona looks to become AMD's largest contender to Opteron, as it incorporates 64 bit registers. This implentation of x86-64, dubbed IA-32e, was originally announced at February's IDF. Akin to the Pentium 4 lineup, 3.2GHz is essentially the end of the line for 130nm as all new processors will be made using the 90nm process. Our roadmaps also hint at a Nocona release past 3.8GHz before the end of the year.

Fortunately, Nocona will retain the same mPGA4 (Socket 604) design, even as it migrates from E7501 to the upcoming Lindenhurst (E7710) and Tumwater (E7515) chipsets in Q2. Intel's recently disclosed plans to dedicate a separate memory bridge will not show up in either of these chipsets.

Dothan's fate seems much more complex than Xeon's. Centrino brought much excitement, as well as absolute dominance to the mobile market last year; and Intel shows no signs of letting up. However, we were perhaps most intrigued to see Dothan variants continue to show up in the blade roadmap as cheap 1P alternatives to Low Voltage Xeons. Even today, those 1.4GHz Banias (Centrino) Pentium Ms with 1MB L2 cache dance circles around just about any equivalently clocked chip. Dothans with 2MB of L2 cache even excite us.

Intel must realize Dothan is a surefire winner. As we can see, 2004 will be the year of Dothan. During the progression of the year, Intel will migrate Centrino's platform of choice from i855 over to i915 with 533FSB support. All existing 400FSB Dothans and Pentium M's will phase out before 2005.

News of Dothan's release schedule falls hand in hand with Intel's recent news that it will move from a MHz based product naming system to a new "product named" strategy. Dothan's lower clock makes it a potential victim for Intel's MHz-is-better campaign.

For those who find Itanium 2 important, the roadmap is actually slightly more interesting than it looks. For starters, there is an impending revision the 1.5+GHz Itanium 2 which plans to boast an extremely impressive 9MB of L3 Cache. This new processor is based on a variant of the Madison core, dubbed Madison 9M. Unfortunately, there will not be an increase in the 128-bit front side bus; Madison 9M shall remain at 400MHz FSB.

The Itanium roadmap gets particularly juicy when we see migration from Deerfield Itanium 2's over to Fanwood 400 and 533. Even though Fanwood will only replace the smaller dual processors, the move to a 533MHz FSB will continue to keep Itanium 2 competitive with big iron.