Intel To Unveil Pentium 4 Chip Monday
(11/15/00, 7:59 p.m. ET) By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
LAS VEGAS -- Intel Corp. will unveil its much-anticipated Pentium 4 chip Monday, company executives said.
The processor, which features a number of enhancements over its Pentium III predecessor, will debut at clock speeds of 1.4-GHz and 1.5-GHz, making it the fastest PC processor on the market -- at least for a while.
Pentium 4 will hit speeds of up to 2 GHz by the third quarter of next year, the company said.
A number of major PC makers, including Dell Computer Corp. (stock: DELL); Compaq Computer Corp. (stock: CPQ); Gateway Inc. (stock: GTW); NEC Corp. (stock: NPNY); IBM Corp. (stock: IBM); Hewlett-Packard Corp. (stock: HWP), and Micron Electronics Inc. (stock: MUEI); will introduce new systems based on the chip, Intel executives said at Comdex Fall 2000.
Beyond faster clock speeds, Pentium 4 should significantly outperform Pentium III because it features a number of design breakthroughs.
"It's really a brand-new architecture from the ground up," said Jeff Austin, an Intel (stock: INTC) marketing manager.
For one, Pentium 4 features what Intel is calling Hyper Pipeline technology -- essentially a deeper information pipeline within the chip that enables faster clock speeds.
It also uses a Rapid Execution Engine that lets the logic unit within the processor run twice as fast as the processor's overall speed, allowing faster mathematical computations.
Additionally, the system bus on the new chip is three times faster than that found on the Pentium III.
All this, Austin said, adds up to a chip that will be able to handle next-generation business applications that include streaming audio and video, voice recognition, and other computationally intensive components.
For all its power, however, Pentium 4 could face a tough time gaining market acceptance, particularly in the consumer sector where it must compete with chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (stock: AMD)
Intel's biggest problem: Pentium 4's 850 chipset will only support RDRAM memory.
Some PC makers have balked at using RDRAM in their systems because of its high price and, according to some, minimal performance improvement over standard SDRAM.
Most would have been happier if Intel had opted for chipsets that use Double Data Rate, or DDR, memory. It's less expensive than Rambus but at least as fast, according to many experts.
AMD already has DDR-compatible chipsets on the market in 1.2-GHz Athlon systems.
To solve the problem, Intel officials confirm that the company will modify a forthcoming chipset, called Brookdale, so that it will be DDR-compatible. That won't happen until at least the second half of next year, however.
Intel will also use a version of Brookdale to support standard SDRAM on Pentium 4.
Some third-party chipset manufacturers, including Via Technologies Inc., have indicated that they might produce DDR-compatible Pentium 4 chipsets sooner than that.
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