Introduction

Update: 8/27/04 - The charts have all been revised. Thanks go out to all the people that posted corrections in the comments section as well as sending them via email. In addition to the corrections, some further information and commentary has been added to the pages. For anyone that actually comes back to this article for reference information, enjoy the changes!

Foreword by Kristopher Kubicki:
From time to time we stumble upon some truly gifted and patient people here at AnandTech. Some weeks ago I wrote a CPU codename cheatsheet as just something to do in an airport terminal to kill time. Very soon after, an extremely diligent Jarred Walton showed me his rendition of the CPU family tree that he was keeping just for fun!? Knowing I was bested, I offered Jarred a chance at writing a pilot for AT, and here it is! Please enjoy the second, extremely thorough CPU Cheatsheet 2.0.


But loud! what lurks in yonder chassis, hot?
A CPU, my programs it will run!
O Pentium, Pentium! wherefore art thou Pentium?
Obscure thy benchmarks and refuse thy name.
What's in a name? that which we call a chip
By any other name would run as fast.

My sincere apologies to Shakespeare, but that mangled version of Romeo and Juliet is an apt description of the world of computer processors. Once upon a time, we dealt with part numbers and megahertz. Larger numbers meant you had a faster computer. 80286 was faster than 8088 and 8086, and the 80386 was faster still, with the 80486 being the king of performance. Life was simple, and life was good. But that is the distant past; welcome to the present.

Where once we had a relatively small number of processor parts to choose from, we are now inundated with product names, model numbers, code names, and features. Keeping track of what each one means is becoming a rather daunting task. Sure, you can always try Googling the information, but sometimes you'll get conflicting information, or unrelated web sites, or only small tidbits of what you're trying to find out. So, why not put together a clear, concise document that contains all of the relevant information? Easier said than done; however, that is exactly what is attempted in this article.

In order to keep things even remotely concise, the cutoff line has been arbitrarily set to the Pentium II and later Intel processors, and the Athlon and later AMD processors. Anything before that might be interesting for those looking at the history of processors, but for all practical purposes, CPUs that old are no longer worth using. Also absent will be figures for power draw and heat dissipation, mainly because I'm not overly concerned with those values, not to mention that AMD and Intel have very different ways of reporting this information. Besides, Intel and AMD design and test their CPUs with a variety of heatsinks, motherboards, and other components to ensure that everything runs properly, so if you use the proper components, you should be fine.

So what will be included? For this first installment, details on clock frequencies, bus speeds, cache sizes, transistor counts, code names, and a few other items has been compiled. The use of model numbers with processors is also something people will likely have trouble keeping straight, so the details of processors for all Athlon XP and later AMD chips and Pentium 4 and later Intel chips will follow. The code names and features will be presented first, with individual processor specifics listed on the later pages. As a whole, it should be a useful quick reference - or cheat sheet, if you prefer - for anyone trying to find details on a modern x86 processor.

With that said, on to the AMD processors. Why AMD first? Because someone has to be first, and AMD comes before Intel in the alphabet.

AMD Processors
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  • Maverick Shiva - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link

    The Articles are really beautiful.
    This was the complete description of the processors that are released and yet to be released.

    The technical details are really awsome and minute to the Detail.

    I would recommend that if you had Anand Tech.com then you are really tech Savvy.
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link

    #72 - the article is now slightly outdated, being a whopping 20 days old. Sorry. We'll look at updating this with future articles, of course.
  • Assimilator1 - Friday, September 17, 2004 - link

    An excellent article:)

    Though as someone mentioned the Semperon 2300 is missing ,this is clocked at 1.583GHz.
    Its listed in AMDs model 8 data sheets
  • endrebjorsvik - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link

    A very nice article with lost of good information!!

    Is there anybody who has all these datas collected into somethong like an exel-file or something.
  • jenand - Wednesday, September 8, 2004 - link

    JarredWalton: If you are going to update the roadmaps. Here is some good Itanium Info:
    http://www.intel.com/design/itanium2/download/Madi...
  • jenand - Wednesday, September 8, 2004 - link

    JarredWalton: If you are going to update the roadmaps. Here is some good Itanium Info:
    http://www.intel.com/design/itanium2/download/Madi...
  • romanl - Tuesday, September 7, 2004 - link

    Why is the Sempron 2300+ missing from a list of AMD CPUs?
  • IntelUser2000 - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link

    It was said that Willamette has 33% superior branch prediction due to its 4KB BTB buffer compared to Pentium III's(P3's had 512B).

    It was also said Pentium M's have 20% superior branch prediction to previous generation. Since we know that the major enhancements on branch prediction for Pentium M is enhanced indirect branch prediction and no BTB buffer increase, its likely its 20% over P3.

    Dothan does have superior branch prediction to 0.13 micron Pentium M, but it would probably be minor compared to Pentium 4's 33% superiority over P3.

    Taking P3 as baseline,
    -Pentium 4 adds 33% using 8x increase in BTB buffer, or 4KB compared to 512B
    -Banias takes P3 and puts enhancements to indirect branch predictor, which gives 20%
    -Prescott takes 33% from Willamette AND 20% from Banias
    -Dothan has Banias' 20% improvements plus something minor

    You say: " However, with the doubling of the cache size on Dothan, I can't imagine Intel would leave it with inferior branch prediction."

    Yeah but I can't imagine that Prescott will have inferior branch prediction than Dothan since its needed more on Prescott. And looking at per clock enhancements Dothan is not much faster than Banias, except Content Creation apps, telling again the enhancements are minor.


    Remember we are talking about how superior one branch predictor would be over another with same pipelines.

    I think of it this way: In terms of worst to best

    Pentium III
    Banias
    P4 Willamette/Northwood/Dothan(I still think 33% improvement over P6 is greater than 20% in Banias+Dothan improvements)
    Prescott


    Oh yeah, there will be 4MB Fanwood parts but at 1.6GHz.

    Also since Itanium's core is half the size of Xeon and Intel also mentioned there will be twice the number of cores that Xeon has and Tukwila will be introduced ~2007 with quad-core Xeon then, Tukwila will have 8-core with Hyperthreading. Montecito is rumored to already have 600mm2 die size. Montecito has 24MB but Tukwila is rumored to have 32MB, not a lot increase, to possibly save space for more cores?

    I mean, Sun plans 32-core designs.

    Link: www.mikeshardware.co.uk
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 1, 2004 - link

    Jenand, just an update, but it appears that Fanwood might not have 9M parts. The latest Intel roadmap talks about "Madison 9M/Fanwood/LV" parts in several places, but all the actual Fanwood parts are listed as 3M parts, and there's a not about pushing back the Fanwood 4M part.

    What is Fanwood? As of right now, I'm really not sure. Initially, I thought it was a renamed Madison, perhaps with more cache or for LV environments. Now, I'm starting to wonder if it might be a 90 nm version of Madison, or a version with more metal layers. Clock speeds are still in the Madison range, so that wouldn't really make sense, but why have the separate name if it's not somehow fundamentally different from Madison?

    And for what it's worth, the charts are now outdated somewhat with the announcement of the 6xx series of 2M L2 Pentium 4 parts. See latest Insider Stories.
  • jenand - Wednesday, September 1, 2004 - link

    Yes, Fanwood looks to be a 9MB L3 part. Strange. But i is limited to DP servers while Madison9M is for MP servers. just like Xeon MP end DP I guess.

    And no not many care about IA64 these days. Not strange. But with Millington I assume that will change! ;)

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