Intel to spill Pentium 4 details at forum
Filed at 3:00 p.m. EDT
By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com
Intel will fill in the details on the Pentium 4 at
its developer forum in San Jose, Calif., this
week and will show off new chips for cell
phones and handheld computers.
The Pentium 4 will feature a completely new
architecture called "NetBurst" designed to
handle tasks--such as data encryption, video
compression or Napster-like peer-to-peer
networking--that have grown in popularity with the Internet, said Albert
Yu, senior vice president of the Intel Architecture Group.
"It will be the highest-performing processor for PCs," Yu said. "We're
moving into streaming video; speech has become much more
commonplace than a year ago. Peer-to-peer has been around for a long
time, but it is now being recognized as the computing paradigm of the
future."
New subsystems inside the NetBurst architecture will enable the
processor to churn more data at a faster rate, Yu said. A micro-engine
called the "Rapid Execution Engine," for example, will run at twice the
speed of the processor and will handle frequently repeated tasks, such as
addition and subtraction calculations.
In a preview of the chip at the company's headquarters, technicians
showed how a Pentium 4 computer can rapidly render, or draw, 3D
images downloaded from the Internet. That sort of processing power
could make it easy for sellers on eBay to post virtual representations of
their products, for example.
The chip, which will debut at 1.4 GHz and arrive in the fourth quarter,
represents the first complete architectural overhaul of the company's
processor line since 1995, when the original Pentium emerged. It will
contain 42 million transistors, compared with 28 million for the Pentium
III.
For Intel, the chip's arrival couldn't come sooner. Manufacturing missteps
and increased competition from Advanced Micro Devices have eroded
the chip giant's once-unassailable dominance in the market for processors
for performance PCs.
Yu and CEO Craig Barrett will be the first keynote speakers at the Intel
Developer Forum, a three-day event that begins Tuesday in San Jose.
The event largely serves as a forum for Intel and its associated
developers to unfurl their road map for future technology.
Along with the Pentium 4, the company will provide updates on Itanium,
the long-awaited 64-bit chip for servers.
While the Pentium 4 and Itanium will be targeted toward the performance
end of the spectrum, the company will also emphasize the device market.
On Wednesday, Ron Smith, general manager of Intel's wireless
computing group, will announce a new line of StrongArm chips--small,
energy-efficient chips for handhelds and cell phones. Formerly
code-named StrongArm 2, the new chips will come out at the end of the
year.
"We are going to be introducing a variant of the StrongArm under a new
brand name," the spokesman said.
One of the first customers for the chip may be Palm. The handheld
computer leader has already said it plans to adopt processors based on
the ARM architecture, a processor design licensed by England's ARM.
StrongArm chips remain one of the most popular versions of the ARM
design. Palm prototypes containing 200-MHz StrongArm chips were
shown off at technology events earlier this year.
Still, the details surrounding the Pentium 4 will likely be the highlight of the
conference. Since last October, chip shortages, combined with AMD's
success with Athlon, have put the company on the defensive in the high
end of the market.
Though analysts have expressed varying opinions on how well the
Pentium 4 will perform, Yu said the NetBurst architecture will bring
several new capabilities to the market.
The Rapid Execution Engine, for example, will "turbocharge a piece of
the engine," Yu said, by shifting repetitive tasks out of the main
processing and into a specialized, accelerated computing center inside the
chip. The Rapid Execution Engine will then be complemented by an
Execution Trace cache, a fast reservoir of memory designed to keep the
engine packed with data.
Other features will exist to speed data flow and make it more efficient.
"Advanced Dynamic Execution" will speed processing by allowing the
processor to recognize parallel patterns and prioritize tasks. In all, the
chip will be capable of handling six instructions per clock cycle over
extended periods. The Pentium III typically handles three.
The chip also comes with 144 new multimedia instructions for better
graphics and sound. By rewriting their software with the instructions in
mind, software developers will be able to improve application
performance.
"The Internet is going from a text kind of thing to something more visual,"
Yu said.
In addition, the Pentium 4 will contain a 20-stage pipeline. The pipeline is
a processor's assembly line. While this means the Pentium 4 will have a
line twice the length of the 10-stage Pentium III, the longer pipeline will
create room for speeding up the chip.
Whether Intel can manufacture the chip in volume will also be a major
question at the conference and beyond, as the company has struggled to
produce 1-GHz Pentium IIIs in significant volume.
Yu said the Pentium 4 will be in volume production toward the end of the
year. An Intel spokesman said that "hundreds of thousands" of the chips
will come out this year.
Historically, that would mean the Pentium 4 will be in shorter supply than
when the Pentium II or other new chips came out, but likely in larger
quantities than the first 1-GHz Pentium IIIs.
In addition, as with the original Pentium, the basic architecture of the
Pentium 4 will become the foundation of the company's processors for
the next five to seven years. Following Moore's Law, this would lead to
chips running at more than 11 GHz in 2006.
"A microarchitecture typically lasts five to seven years, and this one is no
exception," Yu said. |
