Intel strikes back with 1.5 GHz Willamette chip

The performance battle between Intel and AMD reached new heights this week as

Intel, at the opening of its developer conference in San Jose, showed samples of

its next generation Pentium processor developed under the code name Willamette.

The chip has a top performance of 1.5 gigahertz. Early production versions,

available as early as the second half of this year will run at around 1.3 GHz.

That puts Intel back in the processor performance leadership role after AMD

had upstaged Intel last week by showing off a 1.1 GHz Athlon chip. AMD still

holds the lead in the category of fastest available processor. Its current

top-of-the-line production model, running at 850 MHz, exceeds the speed of

Intel’s fastest Pentium III, which operates at 800 MHz.

Analysts said the 1.5 Willamette chip shows Intel has worked the bugs out of

its production processes for the high-end chips. Earlier glitches caused Intel

to be unable to meet demand for its chips. The new Willamette microarchitecture

will be Intel's first new architecture for its 32-bit chip family since the

PentiumPro chip was launched in 1995.

Intel said the production models of the Willamette would be guaranteed to run

at more than 1 gigahertz. In addition, Intel plans to sell a version of its

current Pentium III chip running at around 1GHz. "We will be shipping

hundreds of thousands of Willamettes by the end of this year," said Albert Yu,

general manager of Intel's microprocessor products group. While some analysts

have begun to wonder how fast PC processors need to be, Intel chairman Andy

Grove said the additional power would enable developers to bring advanced new

capabilities to the home and office which simply cannot be offered on current

PCs. And for server systems, there is almost never enough processing power a

chip can supply. "Performance on the server level is absolutely

mandatory," Grove said.

Added Pat Gelsinger, vice president of Intel's Desktop Products Group,

"Performance does matter on the Internet. It does today and it will in the

future." Grove also said Intel is close to launching the Itanium, which

will be aimed at the server market. The chip will be able to run both Windows

2000, Sun Solaris and Linux operating systems. Intel Executive Vice President

Paul Otellini, however, said he's been disappointed with Sun's commitment to

making Solaris work on Itanium, and that now Intel plans to cut back effort in

the cooperative project accordingly. "They've been much more talk than

action. We're going to match their level of commitment and focus our efforts

elsewhere."

Intel wouldn't say if the Willamette will be called Pentium, but Gelsinger

said the company's Pentium brand is too valuable to ignore. "It would be

fair to assume that we'll find a way to leverage that name," Intel also

introduced a new low-priced chip called Timna, aimed at inexpensive PCs. It will

be available this year. Timna is named after a national park in Israel where it

was designed, and will be part of the Celeron line. The chip integrates both

processor functions, a memory controller and a graphics controller.