Intel's 65nm Cedar Mill previewed

Tom's Hardware Guide got its hands on a sample of Intel's 65nm Pentium 4, the Cedar Mill. Basically this CPU is a shrunk NetBurst design without major architectural modifications.

From THG's tests it looks like the Pentium 4 653/651 3.4GHz model will perform nearly identical as the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 650, but it's important to note that Cedar Mill will feature a much lower power consumption. While the Prescott had a thermal design power (TDP) of 130W the Cedar Mill only has a TDP of 86W.

Not only has the production process been modernized: Intel is going to produce 65-nm chips in Hillsboro, Oregon (D1C, D1D), Chandler, Arizona (Fab 22) and Leixlip, Kildare, Ireland (Fab 24). Also, Intel managed to implement energy-saving features such as sleep transistors that apparently help to bring down leakage currents and, finally, heat dissipation. We still can't talk much about virtualization technology (VT) today as this is something that cannot possibly be reviewed by just running some benchmarks within a couple of days.

You can check out the full preview over here.