More CPU Facts & Fantasy

“ For those of you AMD Athlon FX fans, it does not look that we will see much core speed scaling in the coming year, although we are hearing rumors of a possible 250Mhz FSB Athlon FX. AMD roadmaps show to be sticking at “FX-57” through Q4’05. I would assume this to be a 2.8GHz part. The same roadmaps do however show the ?Plain Jane? Athlon 64 939-pin CPU at 4200+ ratings and possibly above by Q3’05. As we have mentioned here a few times before, AMD’s Sempron line of mainstream CPUs will take over the socket 754 line of products completely in late 2005 with the 3700+ being the last 754 socketed Athlon 64.

On the Intel single core side of things we should see a 3.73GHz 1066MHz bus driven Pentium 4 EE kicked off in Q1’05, likely February. Also we have seen some talk about Intel’s EDB or Execute Disable Bit. This is a CPU feature that can help stop buffer overflow attacks. Also this is likely the first Intel CPU we will see with EM64T support for WinXP Pro x64. This EDB feature is offered in current Prescott E Stepping processors now. EDB is designated by a “J” suffix in the 5XX and 3XX processor models. WinXP SP2 is needed to enable this feature. You can find out more about it here on Intel’s site. “