jmke

We first heard about Dothan before Banias ever hit the streets as Pentium M. If you'll remember from our original article on the Pentium M, Banias only missed its target completion date by a matter of days. One by-product of on-time execution was that a number of architectural tweaks that the design team wanted to get into Banias had to be left out, a sacrifice made to preserve on-time execution. As soon as the Banias design was complete, those final architectural tweaks and enhancements that didn't make it into the first Pentium M incarnation were at the top of the list for its successor. As a result, Dothan is best viewed as a more polished evolution of Banias, with higher clocks and more cache made possible by Intel's 90nm process.

But unlike Banias, Dothan wasn't the perfect student on time to its launch; instead, Dothan was released after months of delays. Intel has already publicly released the reason for Dothan's delay. There was apparently an analog design issue with Dothan; more specifically, a PLL was too jittery. Dothan was actually in the hands of OEMs back in January, but the yields were extremely low, thanks to the jittery PLL issue. The solution to the problem required another spin of the silicon, which takes a long time (even longer at 90nm) and resulted in Dothan's lengthy delay.

Being an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary part, Dothan isn't nearly as exciting to talk about as Banias was, but as you'll soon see, that doesn't take away from its worthiness of carrying the Pentium M name

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2129&p=2

__________________