Intel Set to Unveil Speedy Pentium 4
Story Filed: Friday, November 17, 2000 6:03 PM EST
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About every five years, Intel Corp. (INTC.O), the world's No. 1 chip maker, undertakes a mammoth transition.
The company starts spitting out the first versions of a completely new chip, beginning a roughly five-year cycle of production and improvements, until it can wring out no more performance, sales or profit.
The next such round gets underway on Monday with Intel's Pentium 4 chip, the first completely new microarchitecture since the Pentium Pro was introduced in November 1995.
Analysts say the new chip -- the ``brain'' of a personal computer -- should be able to reach speeds of 10 gigahertz or so in five years, about 10-times faster than the latest Pentium III.
Intel says that rolling out a new chip is old hat -- the 32-year-old company has done it many times before -- but some analysts are not so sure.
With 42 million transistors -- 50 percent more than Intel's current Pentium III -- and a size that's twice as big as its predecessor, Intel could run into problems when it cranks up production to millions of units, Merrill Lynch analyst Joe Osha noted.
Intel has had a couple of manufacturing misfires this year, one with a processor and another with a chipset, a device containing the guts of a PC.
``Not only is Intel facing the first processor core switch-over in several years, but the core transition is coming on top of what we believe will be an unusually tough manufacturing process transition,'' Osha wrote in a note to clients.
``We'll give Intel credit for being the best manufacturer in the business, but we'll be interested in seeing how Intel handles the transitions following the miscues on the more straightforward move to 0.18 micron last year.''
BUT DO I REALLY NEED A CHIP THAT FAST?
On top of that, with each successive boost in microprocessor speed, the debate of whether PC users really need that much performance to run spreadsheets, word processor, presentation programs and others and just to surf the Web. It happened when Intel and its rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N) crossed the 1 gigahertz threshold, it happened at 850 MHz, at 500 and so on.
``The challenge Intel faces is keeping people on the performance curve,'' said Gartner Dataquest analyst Martin Reynolds. ``But there are questions of whether this sort of performance is really necessary.''
Yet at every speed grade -- partly because Intel controls 90 percent of the microprocessor market and PC makers must buy the chips that Intel is offering -- consumers and corporations do end up buying the faster chips. And, eventually, software programs that take advantage of the faster chips from both Intel and AMD start to populate the market.
Intel said the Pentium 4 is ``designed for where the Internet is going,'' noting that it's particularly targeted for modern Internet technologies, more realistic three-dimensional graphics, as well as much faster video and audio processing, editing, compression and the like. As is typical with Intel's fastest chips, PCs with the Pentium 4 are initially aimed at so-called ``early adopters'' and professional users.
PCs packing the Pentium 4 won't be cheap, either. Try in the neighborhood of $2,500 initially -- without a monitor -- estimated analyst Roger Kay at International Data Corp. But those prices will drop significantly by the middle of next year, analysts said, because Intel will be producing the chips in larger volumes, allowing it to lower prices.
The first Pentium 4 chips will run at 1.4 gigahertz and 1.5 gigahertz, with plenty of headroom for higher speeds, Intel said.
BELLS AND WHISTLES
In addition to better graphics, video and multimedia performance, the Pentium 4 also has what Intel calls its rapid execution engine, which runs certain frequently operated instructions at double the core clock frequency of the chip.
One of the biggest advances from the Pentium III, analysts said, is the Pentium 4's 400 megahertz bus, which far outstrips the speed of the current 133 megahertz bus. The bus transfers data between the processor and main memory, and a faster bus would give better video, audio and three-dimensional graphics.
The Pentium 4, based on commonly used benchmarks in the industry, performs video encoding 47 percent faster than a 1 gigahertz Pentium III chip and performance in gaming is faster, too -- some 44 percent faster on Quake III Arena, Intel said.
The Pentium 4 chip, at least initially, will use only so-called RDRAM chips, named after Rambus Inc., a maker of technology that speeds the performance of dynamic random-access memory chips.
But RDRAM has been somewhat controversial since its introduction due to what some say is its high cost. Eventually, Reynolds said, the industry will come around to RDRAM, because as processors get faster and faster, the performance boost gained from RDRAM becomes significant.
Concurrent with the official launch of the chip on Monday, major PC makers including Compaq Computer Corp. (CPQ.N), Dell Computer Corp. (DELL.O), Gateway Inc. (GTW.N), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP.N) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) will announce Pentium 4-packing PCs for sale, Intel said.
``Obviously Intel is going to promote the chip with as much enthusiasm as they can,'' IDC's Kay said. ``They plan to roll the entire performance line into Pentium 4 as fast as they can.'' |
