Intel plans to ship the Pentium 4 chip at an initial 1.4-GHz clock speed in the last half of this year and will position it initially toward high-end desktop systems.
Another version of the Pentium 4 -- code-named Foster -- will be available early next year for servers and workstations.
Over the next two years, the new Pentium 4 chip is likely to show up in large volumes in desktop systems. Look for Pentium III chips to remain popular, however, especially in notebook systems.
Intel has also introduced an array of new Pentium III flavours with fast clock speeds, with mobile processors figuring prominently.
What's in a Name?
There had been some speculation about whether the Willamette processor would fall under the Pentium brand name.
According to Pam Pollace, vice president of sales and marketing at Intel, a big part of the decision to dub the new chip Pentium 4 was capitalising on the Pentium brand name.
"Users will be able to instantly recognise the name as Intel's newest high-performance microprocessor," says Pollace.
Other variations of the new chip, such as the chip code-named Foster, may arrive under other Intel brand names, such as the Xeon product line, which is focused on workstations and servers.
The Pentium 4 chip's calling card will be faster clock speeds, but it will also feature several architectural enhancements over Pentium III processors, including a much larger on-board cache.
As clock speeds have reached for the stratosphere over the last several years, fast cache and other bottleneck-smashing improvements have emerged as being as important to performance as clock speed. The Pentium 4 chip is based on a 0.18-micron manufacturing process and will move toward a 0.13-micron process next year.
AMD Working on Mustang
The Pentium 4 will work with an Intel 850 chip set designed to support RDRAM modules. It will probably compete closely with AMD's Mustang processor line, which has not been launched yet.
AMD and Intel have been playing a fierce game of leapfrog in delivering high-end processors, so look for the Mustang chip and the Pentium 4 chip to arrive around the same time, probably before the holiday buying season.
