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Possible Mactel chips, part 1: A look at Yonah

Posted by Dennis Sellers Jul 5, 2005 at 4:00am

Although Apple hasn’t announced which Intel chips will power the upcoming Mactel systems, the most likely suspects are microprocessors that have been dubbed Yonha, Celeron D 3515, Conroe, Woodcrest, Smithfield and Merom. For the rest of the week, we’ll offer a look at the chips and what they might mean to Mac users.

Yonah is an Intel dual-core notebook processors that have been announced and are due for volume production in 2006. Expect to see it in Apple laptops and Mac minis, probably the first of the Mac product line to go Mactel.

Based on a mobile-optimized microarchitecture and 65nm process technology, Yonah is designed to provide power management capabilities and enhanced performance for multiple demanding applications and multi-threaded applications.

The X-series Yonah processors will be part of Intel’s Napa dual-core notebook platform, which is also expected to hit the market in the first quarter of next year, and will represent Intel’s transition from 90nm technology to 65nm. The Yonah chip, will come with a number of enhancements over the current Pentium M line of notebook chips, Mooly Eden, vice president of the Intel mobility group, said at a June 2 briefing.

The two separate cores will share a 2MB cache. Intel says this will “significantly” boost performance because the chips communicate with the cache through a single bus embedded in the chip. Current dual-core desktop chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel come with similar sized caches, but each core accesses only 1MB of cache memory dedicated to it. Sharing the cache will significantly boost performance as the chips communicate with the cache through a single bus embedded in the chip, Eden said.

DarkVision Hardware says that Yonah will have three important new features. The first is Intel Digital Media Boost, an instruction set for rich digital multimedia content creation. The second is Intel Advanced Thermal Manager which will give users enhanced thermal monitoring, accuracy and responsiveness. The third feature is Intel Dynamic Power Coordination to dynamically adjust the performance and power consumption between the two processor cores. In fact, Intel says that Yonah notebooks will use up to 31 percent less power than current Pentium M notebooks (a feature that has doubtless intrigued Jobs & Company).

A single-core version of Yonah will also be released for budget notebooks. Partly because of reduced power consumption, the footprint on Yonah notebooks will be up to 31 percent smaller than those of existing laptops, reports CNET.

By 2008, Intel’s goal is to reduce power consumption in notebooks overall to the point where machines can run for eight hours on a single battery charge. However, Yonah won’t initially support the ability to run 64-bit applications.

“We made a conscious decision not to include it” because of the impact on battery life, Eden said. Intel said it will release a 64-bit chip for notebooks when the market “requires” it, CNET says, adding that what “requires” means is a source of debate.

Yonah will carry 151.6 million transistors and integrate a 667 MHz front side bus. The graphic is from Tom’s Hardware Guide.

Yonah and Napa will succeed the Sonoma platform that rolled out the first quarter of this year. Sonoma includes support for DDR2 memory and improved integrated graphics in the Alviso chip set. Yonha/Napa will address many of the issues that can affect mobile computing, such as battery life and security, said Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. He added that Intel tends to roll out new chip set technology once every 12 months, reports PC World/i>. Yonah will come with power-management technology that can shut down one of the processor cores if the application workload is light, Chandrasekher added.