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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (108070)	8/23/2000 10:25:32 AM
From: chomolungma	Respond to of 186894

Sorry if this has been discussed but here is Charles Boucher’s take on the Pentium 4 from IDF: PENTIUM 4 UNVEILED - SORT OF Intel provided a few glimpses of its new Pentium 4 architecture, but provided little detail on the launch of the new architecture other than stating that the Pentium 4 would launch during the fourth quarter. We believe this represents a minor slip from earlier projections that shipments would start in Q3. It has been rumored that Intel is fine tuning the architecture to provide more consistent yield of 1.4 GHz devices, which could account for some of the delay. Systems were demonstrated during the keynote presentation running at 1.4 GHz, which is expected to be the top speed of the processor at the time it is launched. Another system was clocked up to 2 GHz as a demonstration of the reach of the architecture at the current time. It appears that the architecture is sound and capable of attaining the speeds that Intel wants to launch the processor at, and the company should be very close to being able to release the design to production. The Pentium 4 incorporates a number of new design innovations to increase the overall performance of the Pentium 4 platform, The micro-architecture is a completely new design called NetBurst, which incorporates a 20 stage execution pipeline, twice as deep as the 10 stage pipeline of the Pentium 111. It utilizes a Rapid Execution Engine, which enables the Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) to run at double the clock frequency of the rest of the processor core for integer instructions, increasing performance. The first level cache, renamed Execution Trace Cache has been designed to provide higher throughput to keep up with the faster processor core. The 256K level 2 cache is integrated onto the chip, and has also been redesigned for higher throughput. The Streaming SIMI) Extension 2 (SSE2) microcode extensions incorporate 144 new instructions to accelerate the performance of many Internet applications. The 850 chipset which will support the Pentium 4 (formerly code named Tehama) utilizes a 100 MHz system bus, but uses clock multiplication to provide a 200 MHz address transfer rate and a 400 MHz data transfer rate. The Pentium 4 architecture is intended to accelerate popular Internet applications, such as streaming audio and video, peer-to-peer computing, speech processing, security, and more. What is the significance of this? Intel's Pentium 4 architecture should put the company solidly atop the desktop processor performance pyramid, a position it has shared with competitor AMD for the last year. The new micro-architecture is capable of attaining clock speeds well above 1. 5 GHz using 0. 18 micron, aluminum interconnect technology through architectural innovation. When the process is shrunk to 0. 13 micron with copper interconnect, the clock rate of the processor should increase dramatically. With initial shipments in Q4 and the company confident that the unit shipment ramp should be at least comparable to that of the Pentium 111, we would estimate that Pentium 4 could achieve unit crossover by Q3 of 2001 at least. This will put tremendous pressure on Intel's competitors in the high performance segments of the PC market.