Intel's future looks bright

I saw Intel's roadmaps yesterday and they look pretty bright.

Especially Conroe will mean a new evolution I believe. Conroe is a member of the new Merom family, this is a new architecture which is based on the Pentium M design. This means that Conroe will mean the end of the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture.

One of the major advantages will be its low power consumption, it's rumoured that the maximum Thermal Design Power (TDP) of the desktop Conroe is only 60W! Current top models like the Pentium D 840 have a TDP of 130W. So with Conroe Intel plans to seriously cut power consumption.

I wonder which consequences this will have for heatsink manufacturers, these processors won't get as hot as the previous generations so some of those extreme air cooling solutions will soon be a bit overkill. But since the Conroe will run cooler it may also be easier to overclock this chip..

If everything goes will Intel will introduce the Conroe in the second half of next year (or maybe in 2007). It's expected to be a dual-core 65nm part with 4MB L2 cache, Intel's Virtualization Technology, Lagrande, Intel Active Management Technology 2 and others.

Somewhere in 2007 we can expect Conroe's sucessor, the Nehalem. Years ago Intel claimed the Nehalem would reach the magic 10GHz mark but these plans changed dramatically. Intel's isn't doing the GHz race anymore and the Nehalem will be based on the Conroe design. One of the new things is that Nehalem will replace the FSB with the new CSI infrastructure.

Apple was clearly pleased with Intel's roadmap. Here's a recent quote from Steve Jobs regarding the switch to x86 processors:

"Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do. When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PowerPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do."

Lets hope that AMD's roadmap plans are as cool as those from Intel..