Are Merom and Yonah supposed to co-exist?

[coolsilicon]

On Monday Intel will not only launch Conroe but also Merom, I've read.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33102

What do you think is going to happen with Yonah after that? Will it co-exist or just being dropped? Wouldn't make to much sense since Intel has just released the T2700 (2.33 GHz).

Another interesting point is virtualization. According to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization_Technology

this technology is built into Yonah but sometimes disabled in BIOS. How about the Duo Core Thinkpads? Is it disabled in these machines? I'm about to switch to Core Duo because of the demanding video stuff I'm playing with. I wouldn't care to much for the ~20% faster processing of Merom since Yonah appears to provide already a lot of computing power.

[christopher_wolf]

Iiiii wouldn't trust the Wikipedia specs on the Yonah when it comes to Virtualization; Intel certainly is moving in that direction and there is also one little option in the BIOS that is not only cryptically named and has to do with dual core cross-loading, doesn't allow the system to boot if selected. It has been suspected that there will be some amount of virtualization technology (as much was even stated by Intel) back when Yonah was released. Though I think we will be, in the more likely scenario, seeing it in the Santa Rosa Merom platform out in 2007. That is another reason why I am waiting for Merom in addition to 64-bit; another one being that I *really* love my current Thinkpads and my T43 does great.

It is just going to be like Dothan and Banias; Dothan eventually became more prevelant after it was released than Banias in the long run and Intel adjusted manufacturing as such. They will slowly move over to it after it gains wide deployment a year or so after its launch. At least, that is what Intel has always done before; they could probably keep Yonah around and update it to provide an easy low power ULV/high performance chipset for portables on down the line as opposed to coming up with a new chipset again.

[coolsilicon]

Iiiii wouldn't trust the Wikipedia specs on the Yonah when it comes to Virtualization; Intel certainly is moving in that direction and there is also one little option in the BIOS that is not only cryptically named and has to do with dual core cross-loading, doesn't allow the system to boot if selected.

That sounds interesting. Maybe we will learn more on this with one of the next BIOS releases. OTOH, one could always dedicate one of the two cores exclusively to a VMWARE session, I'd think, and have this "classic" virtualization working pretty nicely. But then again, this seems to go far beyond of what VMWARE does:

http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/

Perhaps we're going to see a bunch of exiting stuff in 2007 (or 2008, along with Vista's SP2). By then a Core Duo will have crunched a lot of (video-) numbers