Review: Pentium 4 with i845

Details on Northwood and i845

Northwood will be the first die shrink of the Pentium 4 to 0,13 Micron. As usual, lower voltages and higher clockspeeds will come with that. For the beginning, even cooling the 42 plus million transistors may become easier - until clock speeds get into the 3 GHz range. That "plus" comes from the fact that Intel is rumoured to double both the L1 and L2 caches to 16 and 512 KByte for Northwood respectively.

Further details on the general Pentium 4 architecture, labeled NetBurst by Intel, can be found in this report along with lots of schematics. Currently this feature is only available in english, please bear with us.

Socket 478 is bad news for people willing to upgrade their P4 machines after a few months already: The socket requires new heatsinks, old ones will not fit. As the socket is much smaller, it could not hold the huge heatsinks anymore and Intel built a very solid frame around the socket as the new retention mechanism. Heatsinks we saw were also equipped with bigger fans (mounting holes were 60 millimeters apart, instead of 50). As there's also electrical differences adapters also seem unlikely to appear.

The i845 chipset only brings a new Northbridge, or MCH in Intel jargon. Soutbridges (ICH with Intel) will be the well-known ICH-2 with new steppings.