Desktop manufacturers are about to launch a new generation of Pentium machines into the market that will significantly improve data and content handling for Internet users.
The Pentium 4 is scheduled to be available Monday, Nov. 20, and manufacturers such as Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, Gateway, IBM, Micron Electronics and NEC are expected to have their first machines incorporating the chip available within a few days, said Paul Otellini, general manager for Intel architecture.
The Pentium 4 in its initial versions will run at 1.4 Gigahertz and 1.5 GHz, compared with the fastest Pentium III, which runs at 1 GHz. The higher clock speed yields "significantly higher performance," said Jeff McCrea, Intel's desktop marketing director, but Intel officials declined to release benchmarking and pricing information on the new chip at a briefing at Comdex on its upcoming release. The company will make the information available Monday with the release of the chip, officials said.
More significantly, McCrea said, will be the Pentium 4's underlying "NetBurst" architecture, a redesign of the chip's circuitry to better handle the tasks that Internet users throw at it. These include handling streaming media, editing audio and video files for inclusion on a Web site, and handling large amounts of varied data.
The 0.18-micron circuits in the Pentium 4 are the same as those in the Pentium III predecessor, but the Pentium 4 will move to smaller 0.13-micron circuits in the fourth quarter of next year. The smaller circuit shrinks the distances electrons must travel through the chip, which "makes it faster and more powerful," said Howard High, an Intel spokesman.
In addition, the Pentium 4 will move to the higher clock speed of 2 GHz in the third quarter of 2001, Otellini said. Intel has no immediate plans, however, to make the chip available in a low-power version for laptops and notebooks, McCrea said. The power-conserving versions of the Pentium III are likely to satisfy the demands of notebook manufacturers for the foreseeable future, he said.
The Pentium 4 carries a total of 42 million transistors, compared with the 29 million built into the Pentium III. But Intel spokesmen noted that the underlying architectural changes were geared toward making the Pentium more effective as a desktop machine. The Pentium 4 remains a 32-bit architecture, vs. the upcoming Itanium chip, which will be 64-bit architecture.
The changes to the design include a rapid execution engine, which identifies the most frequently executed instructions in the Windows code base and executes them at 3 GHz, or double the normal clock speed of the faster version of the chip. Intel declined to provide specific examples of how much the move speeded up performance at its Comdex briefing at Caesar's Palace.
Intel has also expanded from 10 pipeline stages in the Pentium III to 20 in the Pentium 4. The staging allows instructions to be loaded and executed in turn by the central processing unit from the application it is running, rather than waiting for a strict sequential execution. One pipeline can feed instructions into the CPU while another waits for results, McCrea noted.
Five 0.18-micron fabrication plants are available to produce the Pentium 4, McCrea said. He foresaw no likelihood of shortages as manufacturers geared up production of units incorporating the chip
