Intel Developer Forum Fall 2003 - Day 2: All About Mobile

Extreme Edition isn't the only thing with a 2MB cache

Next up on the block was something we had been hoping to see: Intel officially announced their next revision of Pentium-M previously codenamed Dothan. This little beauty is made up of 140M transistors, and incorporates a massive 2MB L2 cache. Of course, this is all made possible through Intel's 90nm fab process, and incorporates their strained silicon technology.

You can think of Dothan as a bit more than just a die shrink to 90nm, since it encapsulates a lot of what the original Banias design team didn't have time to include to make the Pentium-M launch. Dothan includes a more advanced register file that apparently better manages power when dealing with a bunch of mixed reads and writes, although there wasn't much more data on register file improvements given.

With the larger L2 cache, Dothan's data prefetching algorithms can be a bit more aggressive as they have more space to prefetch data into - thus improving performance as well.

Intel demonstrated Dothan in a head-to-head against the current Banias Pentium-M core by running the two at the same clock speed, in which case the Dothan processor was clearly ahead in a number of business and content creation tasks Intel ran. Dothan is due out in Q4 and will debut at 1.8GHz, before rising to 1.9/2.0GHz next year.