Pentium M

Introduced in March 2003, the Pentium M is an x86 architecture microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and forms part of the Intel Centrino platform. The processor was originally designed for use in laptop personal computers, thus the "M" for mobile. It was codenamed "Banias" before its introduction. The codenames of the Pentium M are all locations in Israel, the location of the Pentium M design team.

Yonah & Sossaman

The next incarnation of the Pentium M, codenamed Yonah, taped out in mid-September 2004 and is due to ship in late 2005 for volume introduction in early 2006. Yonah is a dual-core design targeted for manufacturing on a 65 nm process, and will be Intel's first dual-core processor designed from scratch.

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Yonah consists of two cores based on the Banias/Dothan microarchitecture, a 2MB L2 cache shared by both cores, and an arbiter bus that controls L2 cache and FSB access. Floating point performance has been drastically improved through the addition of SSE3 instructions and improvements to SSE and SSE2 implementations. Yonah also includes Vanderpool (VT) virtualization technology and the ability to disable one core to conserve power. EM64T (Intel's name for AMD64) will not be available in Yonah.

Related Topics:
SSE3 - SSE - SSE2 - Vanderpool - EM64T - AMD64

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Yonah is expected to launch at clock speeds up to 2.16 GHz with a 667 MHz FSB (166 MHz quad-pumped). A single core version will also be available, and a cut-down version of that will be marketed under the Celeron M brand.

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In early 2005, rumors began circulating that Intel was considering tweaking the Yonah core for a possible release on the desktop. Confidential Intel presentations also indicate that Intel intends to release a version of Yonah, codenamed Sossaman, for blade servers. Sossaman will be marketed as Xeon LV and ULV. The only difference between Yonah and Sossaman cores will be the capability of the second to be used in 2-way systems.

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