Dec 11, 2001:  Size and Speed of the 130 nm Northwood Pentium 4 


Size and Speed of the 130 nm Northwood Pentium 4

(  by Hans de Vries  )

The online version of Intels IEDM presentation of it's latest 130 nm process technology which reduces the gate length to 60 nm reveals a bit of information on its Northwood processor. The 130 nm version of the Pentium 4.

http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/0.13micronlogic_pres.pdf

Page 22 shows some nice die photographs of the 180 nm Willamette core and its 130 nm Northwood cousin. The vertical size seems to scale with a ratio of 0.72 which is exactly the 130/180 ratio we would expect. Northwood's 512 kbyte level 2 cache is clearly visible at the right side, twice as large as Willamette 256 kb L2 cache. The processing cores seem exactly scaled replicas. A little piece of Northwood's die is empty area. The estimated sizes assumed that the scaling on the presentation is correct:

 

Processor Process Vertical Horizontal Die Size
Willamette 180 nm 15.7 mm 13.8 mm 217 mm2
Northwood 130 nm 11.27 mm 11.27 mm 127 mm2

 

Page 23 shows the so-called Schmoo-plot that reveals processor speed versus supply voltage. The maximum speed at 1.4V is given as 2.5 GHz.  

An earlier super-cooled Northwood demo demonstrated a clock-speed of 3.5 GHz. This represents a 40% over-clocking ratio which is not unusual.  Intel president and CEO Craig Barrett has promised a 3 GHz version for late 2002 during a two hour webcast last october.

 

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