Intel Core 2 Duo E4300

Allendale is here!

While the E4300 is the slowest chip in Intel’s line-up at the present moment, there is a slower E4000-series chip scheduled to arrive sometime in the second quarter, but no details on pricing or launch time frame have been revealed. It’ll be known as the E4200 and will have a 1.60GHz core clock along with carrying the same set of features as both the E4300 and E4400.

The Allendale core is essentially a cut down version of Conroe with less physical L2 cache and no support for Intel’s Virtualisation Technology. The transistors saved as a result of removing support for Virtualisation Technology and less physical L2 cache should reduce the cost of making the E4000-series CPUs in comparison to the costs of producing a similarly specified Conroe E6000-series processor. Conroe’s L2 cache takes up around 40-45% of the total surface area; docking half of that will mean that Allendale’s cost of manufacture should be about 20-25% less than Conroe on a per-chip basis.

Although we estimate that the die size has been reduced by around 20-25%, Intel’s TDP specification for the Core 2 Duo E4300 remains the same as Intel’s other Core 2 Duo processors at 65W (typical). Everything else inside Allendale remains intact, meaning that the chip supports all of the latest technology, including MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology, Execute Disable Bit, EM64T, C1E (Enhanced Halt State) and Intel Thermal Monitor 2.

Because the current Core 2 Duo E6000 series processors use a 1066MHz front side bus and relatively low multipliers, the E6300 and E6400 chips in particular require a lot of headroom in both motherboard and memory in order to achieve high clock speeds. However, with the E4300’s lower front side bus speed and higher multiplier, it should make overclocking a little easier, as you don’t need a massively overclockable motherboard and expensive memory to achieve a near 100% overclock (providing the chip is of course capable of doing those kinds of speeds).

Physical Differences:

The physical differences between Conroe and Allendale are small, but there are differences in the layout and number of SMT (surface mount technology) components on the back of the two CPUs is different. There are 44 SMT components on the back of the Core 2 Duo E6300, while the E4300 has 39 components on the back. We suspect this is because the Allendale core doesn’t require quite as much circuitry as Conroe due to the smaller cache.