Willamette Replacement Already

There's some pretty incredible news on The Register, where it's reported that the upcoming Willamette processor (the first "all new" CPU since the Pentium Pro, scheduled to appear at the end of the year, at speeds up to 1.4Ghz) by Intel will be replaced pretty soon after the introduction. A number of motherboard vendors have revealed they have no plans to support the CPU, since there is already a next generation CPU in the works, codenamed Tulloch, that should show up in the 2nd quarter of 2001.

One of the reasons for the reluctance to adopt Willamette is that Tulloch, although essentially based on the same architecture, will have 479 pins, rather than 423 pins. It is also expected to clock in at around 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz according to sources. There will be two versions, one with a single Rambus channel and one with a dual channel, according to sources.