HEXUS.beans :: Intel Yonah features exposed

[Rys]

Originally Posted by Oor Willy

Daydreaming this morning about sun, sea and sand, being as it is a very brisk day in February in dear ol' Blighty, whispers reach me on the chilly winds that Intel, paragon of processor virtue, is intentionally hiding a mightily attractive feature in one of its new CPUs, and from the very buying public that might be interested in it. 64-bits, sir? Ooh, suits you! Got no idea what I'm on about? You'll be clicking on this link then.

Want to comment on Willy's bean? Do so in this very thread!

[Johnny Bravo]

So wait, can you actually run 64bit programs on it, or has it been "hard locked" not to do so?

[wizzard]

Sounds like EMT64 has just been disabled on the processor. I doubt that it can be re-enabled. Could they have turned them off to keep the TDP down, for in a notebook?

[rivers]

I doubt (just IMHO) EMT64 has such great thermal payload... maybe it's a just the typical Intel approach, gradually adding features to a CPU family.

[ch424]

Interesting point... it may be that the 64-bitness wasn't entirely ready: Was it the Intel 875 chipset that was going to have built-in WiFi but it was broken, so they switched it off? I can't remember.

What is quite amusing is the way Gizmodo have completely blown this up! I can't wait til it hits Engadget.

ch424

[Seppi2k]

And it transpires that Sossaman supports iAMD64, er, sorry, 'EM64T', symmetric multi-processing with another Sossaman Xeon, and hardware virtualisation. Intel's implementation of the 64-bit extension to x86, SMP and hardware VT are all missing from the official specs of Intel Core Duo consumer processors, despite Yonah and Sossaman being the same thing.

I have an Dell Inspiron 9400 with the Yonah CPU and there's an option in the BIOS to ENABLE the VT.



-=Seppi2k=-

[WJMoore]

Don't know about the 64-bit support but it definitely supports virtualization. There is quite a lot of conflicting information floating around about this but there is a pretty definite response here: http://appleintelfaq.com/#10.1 The More info link on that page links to an e-mail from Intel stating VT is supported by the Core Duo chips.