Intel has confirmed it will not release a 4GHz version
of its flagship Pentium 4 product. Instead it will transfer its
engineers to the company's new design priorities.
After years of promoting clock speed as the most important
indicator of processor performance, Intel now believes that
introducing multicore products and new silicon features,
collectively known as the "Ts", are the best ways to improve
processor performance.
The company has decided to break Intel president Paul Otellini's
promise to release a 4GHz Pentium 4 product and will move engineers
working on that product to other projects, said Intel spokesman
Bill Kircos.
Earlier this year, Intel delayed the arrival of the 4GHz Pentium
4 until the first quarter of 2005. Otellini had promised to have
that product out by the end of 2004.
Intel will still introduce a faster front-side bus in its
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chips, which will top out at 3.73GHz.
Starting next year, the company will add an additional 1Mbyte of
cache memory to its Pentium 4 chips based on the Prescott 90
nanometer core, and cap the clock speed of that product at
3.8GHz.
Intel has re-evaluated many product decisions following chief
executive officer Craig Barrett's memo earlier this year which
chastised the company for its string of product delays and
manufacturing glitches.
The memo called for Intel to focus on products that can be
delivered on time and without incident, and the decision to forgo
the 4GHz chip seems linked to that emerging mindset.
It is easier to increase performance by adding cache memory to a
processor, said Bill Kirby, director of platform marketing at
Intel. Cache memory stores frequently accessed data close to the
processor where it can be retrieved more quickly than data stored
in the main memory.
Industry-wide concerns about the amount of power required to
keep highly clocked processors running has caused most chip
companies to move away from high clock speed designs.
Intel is now focusing on the "platformisation" of its chips, a
concept that Otellini touched on during his keynote address at the
Intel Developer Forum last month, Kircos said.
There were no technical or thermal limitations that prevented
Intel from releasing a 4GHz product, Kirby said. But Intel would
have to devote time and energy to tweaking circuit designs and
testing those chips.
That always takes place when a chip maker validates a higher
speed grade, but at a certain point it is no longer worth the
effort, he said.
"Performance still matters, and performance on multiple vectors
still matters," Kirby said. "The fundamental decision was whether
to chase megahertz ... or to bring in other features like cache and
multicore."
Those additional vectors include features such as
hyperthreading, the software-based technology that Intel has used
in its Pentium 4 chips for more than a year to fool a PC's
operating system into believing the PC has two processors.
During its usual second-quarter chipset introduction in 2005,
Intel will introduce the other platform technologies it has spoken
about during the last several IDFs. These include: VT, or
Vanderpool Technology, a virtualisation feature; LT, or LaGrande
Technology, hardware-based security features; EM64T, Intel's name
for its 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set, and AMT, or
Active Management Technology, a new feature aimed at making PCs
easier to manage.
After that chipset launch, Intel will be ready to introduce its
first dual-core desktop chips. Those chips will keep the Netburst
architecture in at least the first generation of dual-core
products, and probably into the second, Kirby said.
He declined to offer further details about Intel's dual-core
desktop chips.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service