Intel displays 3.5 GHz Pentium 4

On the second day of its annual developer conference in San Jose, Intel

executives wowed the audience with the demonstration of a prototype Pentium 4

processor running at a stunning 3.5 GHz almost twice as fast as the 2GHz

processor the company launched just the previous day.

The demonstration was a clear effort by Intel to show the industry it is not

only back in the performance leadership position but that the company intends to

stay there for the foreseeable future. Intel executive vice president Paul

Otellini who heads the Intel Architecture Group said Intel will continue to

invest in the product development, manufacturing and process technologies.

"While this focus on raw processor speed is important, it's not sufficient

to drive the levels of growth and innovation that will allow our industry to

prosper."

Otellini then detailed a number of key new processor innovations for high-end

server chips and mobile device processors. "We're expanding our focus to

include the fundamental technologies and chip design features that will deliver

greater value and functionality to the people who use computers every day."

As an example of the innovative approach Intel will enhance its Xeon server

chips with an advanced "Hyper-Threading" technology that will break up

incoming stream of data into two parallel streams that improves application

performance by 30 percent as less of the processor's computing power sits

idle.  "Intel's Hyper-Threading technology effectively enables

multiprocessing on a single chip. We believe this technology represents a

significant advance in computing."

Hyper-Threading will be introduced commercially in the market next year and

will migrate to the rest of the Intel processor line over time as software is

tuned to take advantage of its performance benefits.

Otellini also detailed a major innovation for the company's

soon-to-be-released family of mobile processors that will use a so-called ‘Banias’

power management technology that optimizes power management. Different parts of

the chip require different levels of power and the new power management system

will deliver just enough power to each area of the chip to ensure peak

performance. This will significantly reduce overall power consumption and thus

extend battery life. The Banias technology will be debuted in 2003.

Otellini also said that Intel now expects the second-generation

"McKinley" Itanium processor to ship in volume by mid-2002. Itanium

chip sales may get a boost soon from Microsoft's Windows XP operating system,

which takes advantage of Itanium's 64-bit processor speed.