Intel playing games with new chip

SAN JOSE: Intel Corp. will release a new processor targeted at gamers and PC enthusiasts that will be available within the next month or two, an executive said.

The new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will run at 3.2 gigahertz and come with an additional 2 megabytes of cache, Louis Burns, vice president and co-general manager of Intel's desktop platforms group, said in his keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum.

The new chip will include Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology that enables PCs to run multiple programs without any degradation to performance, he said.

"Intel is positioning this against the Athlon 64," the 64-bit PC processor due out from rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. later this month, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

"Gaming is one of the target markets" for Athlon 64, he added.

The computer gaming market is an increasingly competitive one, with both small, private manufacturers and major industry players like Dell Inc. vying for share.

Top-of-the-line gaming machines can easily cost more than $5,000, and Intel has long supported the gaming market as a forum to show off the capabilities of its chips. It is a key sponsor of the Cyberathlete Professional League and has a regular presence at industry trade shows.

Intel also makes computer graphics chips, though most gamers typically bypass Intel's offerings in that area in favor of high-powered add-in chips from either Nvidia Corp. or ATI Technologies Inc.

Burns also said Intel has been working with other technology companies on the Digital Home Working Group to develop interoperability standards for networking PCs, TVs and other devices in the home.

The company is also working with entertainment companies on a standard, dubbed Digital Transmission Content Protection over Internet Protocol, for protecting digital content so consumers can watch movies and listen to music on different devices at home without being able to make illegal copies, he said.

© Reuters