Intel Corp. is sampling the first microprocessors manufactured on its 90-nanometer process technology ? the Prescott for desktop PCs and the Dothan, an improved version of the Pentium M chip for laptops, the company said last week. Both chips are on schedule for "revenue shipments" next quarter, Intel said. The company's ramp of its 90-nm process is proceeding as expected, and initial production at its D1C 300-mm wafer development fabrication facility in Hillsboro, Ore., is already yielding validated processors, an Intel spokesman said. Fab 11X in Albuquerque, N.M., is primed to come online in the fourth quarter as planned, Intel said, while a plant in Leixlip, Ireland, is expected to start 90-nm processing in the first half of 2004. G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), said Intel "has already proven its 90-nm process in its Oregon development fab. Now it's just a matter of making the technology work in other fabs." Analysts said that PC makers will wait to provide systems based on the Prescott and Dothan devices until Intel has ratcheted 90-nm production to a level where it can meet volume consumer demand. Still, the company is confident enough of the debut of its 90-nm process to have scheduled special briefings on the technology for the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), to be held Sept. 16-18 in San Jose. Prescott, an upgrade over current Pentium 4 microprocessors, doubles the on-die Level 2 cache to 1 Mbyte with an expected 3.4-GHz frequency. Intel has said Prescott will have improved prefetch branch prediction for increased performance. The Pentium 4 's long pipeline can slow when a wrong prefetch prediction must be purged and refilled with data. The processor has 13 new instructions, ranging from storing and loading integer data to new floating-point operations. Intel is expected to follow its usual pattern of fielding several versions of Prescott to serve various market segments. Next year, the company will add both higher- and lower-frequency chips to the line. Versions running at 2.8 and 3 GHz are planned as lower-priced entries for the mainstream market. Shane Rau, a processor analyst with IDC in Mountain View, Calif., said the lower-speed Prescotts will be "a natural fallout" from bin testing. The laptop chip, Dothan, will have 2 Mbytes of on-die Level 2 cache, twice that of the current Pentium M. The MPU will also have new power management features to extend battery time, Intel said. Source: EETimes