Following on from the information disclosed at the Fall Intel Developer Forum recently, we've sat down to take a look at how Intel's next-generation CPU architecture is shaping up - Is this what the CPU giant needs to strike back against AMD in the market?



Much of the changes between NetBurst and this new architecture can be traced in some way, shape or form back to Intel's recent mobile architecture, Banias. First and foremost, Intel will be moving away from the massive number of pipeline stages seen in the Pentium 4, in favour or less stages as seen in Intel's mobile CPUs (and indeed the Athlon 64). While increasing the number of pipeline stages can help to increase clock speed, it comes at the cost of increased power consumption and heat, as well as a reduced performance - All undesirable factors, particularly if it doesn't allow for massive clock speed gains as we saw with Prescott. With this in mind, Intel's next-generation architecture will feature 14 pipeline stages, compared to the 12 stages which can be found on existing Athlon 64 designs. This should improve performance considerably alone; although the side effect of this is that we most likely still won't be seeing a 4GHz CPU from Intel any time soon.

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