At this year's spring IDF, Intel called on the industry to "develop for 64 bits, now." Intel's core message is an appeal to strike while the iron is hot, taking advantage now of a fast dual core processor ramp up. Two entire chip generations are to be launched for all business segments within less than a year; the second one is trimmed to align the whole processor portfolio, and poised to be the backbone for the rest of this decade.

Lots of rumors have been floating around regarding Intel's next generation micro-architecture; most of them refer to it as inflated Pentium M or even Pentium III type multi cores. When we were talking to Mooly Eden, Vice President of Intel's Mobility Group, he characterized the Merom mobile dual core (H2/2006) as a "refresh" of what we will get with Yonah at the beginning of 2006. We will talk about Yonah later on, but this comment makes a lot of difference when it comes to the rumors. All of Yonah's fundamentals will be integral parts of Merom, which, again, shares its core architecture with Conroe (desktop) and Woodcrest (server), except for caching capacity.

The chips will be differentiated by their validation processes, packages, clock speeds, and features that are enabled or disabled. This also backs Intel's claims of a "bottoms-up design," as stated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini, although the groundwork certainly has much more to do with Pentium M than with NetBurst. We received further confirmation of this from CPU Validation Manager Ronny Korner, who promised that each Yonah core would be faster than Dothan. Also, Intel systematically avoided referring to its new baby as the next Pentium generation, conserving the option to fabricate an entirely new brand. Lastly, this micro architecture is designed to be the carrier for processes from 65 nm to 45 nm and all the way down to 32 nm.

It will take some time to unfold the potential of multicore architectures, and to adapt environments as well as develop new ones that had not been possible in the single core "stone age." From Intel's point of view, the most important pillar for growth is increasing mobility on all application fronts.

Apart from that, Intel is trying to excavate new, emerging markets, and it is in the final stages of its platformization process. Paul Otellini called it "the largest reorganization in the company's history". One result is the Channel Platforms Group, which caters to new business opportunities. Another consequence, probably more tangible to our readers, is the creation of nomenclature for future components such as the Broadwater chipsets' south bridge ICH8 (see image below).

The denotations DO and DH represent the Digital Office and the Digital Home.