CPUs in 2001: Roadmap Update

Intel finishes off the year

Backing up a couple of months, at the start of the second quarter, in April 2001, Intel is set to release the Pentium 4 at 1.7GHz.  This will continue to give the Intel at least a 200MHz clock speed advantage over AMD.  We have yet to see a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 listed on any roadmaps, indicating that if one were to be manufactured that it would be released sometime in February or March of 2001.

In May Intel will be bringing the second 100MHz FSB Celeron to market clocked at 850MHz.  Also in May, Intel will re-release the 1.13GHz Pentium III, still based on the Coppermine core however with a new stepping which should be solid at 1.13GHz. 

We are expecting to see AMD launch the Palomino and Morgan cores in the May-June timeframe as we mentioned above, which will close out the second quarter of CPU releases in 2001.

AMD will continue to ramp the speed of their Athlon and Duron parts throughout the rest of the year, unfortunately our sources have not revealed the estimated release dates for these CPUs other than the generic quarter figures we gave in our November 2000 Roadmap Update. 

Over a year after the release of the first 1GHz processors, Intel will be releasing the first 2GHz processor which will, of course, be a Pentium 4 based on the current 0.18-micron Willamette core.  This launch should come in July to kick off the third quarter and will be accompanied by the release of the first Tualatin-256 based Pentium III processor at 1.26GHz.  Contrary to earlier reports about the Tualatin-256 based Pentium III, it will still use the 133MHz FSB.  For more information on the Tualatin-256 core, read our latest Intel CPU & Chipset Roadmap. 

August should see the release of the 900MHz Celeron, with the 950 and 1GHz parts not coming until October at earliest.  Of course these releases will depend greatly on how AMD decides to ramp their Duron in clock speed that, from current indications, seems to be pretty aggressive. 

Kicking off the final quarter of 2001, Intel will be releasing the first 0.13-micron Pentium 4 processors in October.  These CPUs will feature a die that is half the size of the current 217mm^2 Pentium 4 die, making it much cheaper to produce and cooler running as well.  The most recent information seems to indicate that the smaller die size of the Northwood processor (0.13-micron Pentium 4) will allow Intel to outfit it with 512KB of L2 cache instead of the 256KB that it features currently.  For more information on the Northwood read our original preview of it as well as our article on Intel's 0.13-micron process.