Intel's P-4 breaks 2 GHz barrier

Less than nine months after breaking the 1 Giga hertz microprocessor speed

barrier, a journey that took the company 28 years to accomplish, Intel showed

off its new Pentium 4 processor. One of the versions was running at a stunning 2

GHz, squeezing 42 million transistors onto a single chip, up from 28 million

transistors on the Pentium III.

Intel demonstrated the new Pentium 4s, along with faster Xeon server

processors that will run at 1GHz (up from 933MHz), at its annual developers

conference in San Jose.

Intel did not estimate a shipping date for the 2 GHz Pentium 4, but analysts

don't believe it will be before the middle of next year. In the mean time, the

company will ship the initial Pentium 4 this fall (October) running at 1.4 GHz.

The 2 GHz version will be available when Intel starts producing the chip with

new 0.13 micron processing technology as opposed to the 0.18 micron geometry

used for the initial Pentium 4.

At 0.13 Micron, a circuit's width is equivalent to that of one golf ball in a

string of 400,000 that would stretch for approximately 20 kilometers. The

demonstration puts Intel firmly back in the processor performance leadership

position which it has had to share with arch rival Advanced Micro Devices for

much of the past year when AMD actually held a slight edge over Intel.

AMD, however, continued to win the battle for high-performance chips in the

marketplace. Its fastest Athlon processor currently runs at a speed of 1.1 GHz.

But that chip is already shipping in high volume while Intel's 1.13 GHz Pentium

III is not expected to be available in high volume for another couple of months.

It is not clear how AMD will respond to Intel's challenge. One AMD engineer

at last week's LinuxWorld Expo said he believes his company's performance will

continue to match, if not exceed Intel's, once the company's new Dresden 12-inch

fab gets up to full production status. That fab, using the same advanced 1.8 and

1.3 micron technologies, combined with AMD's advanced copper interconnects,

could vastly increase the processing speeds of AMD's K7 chips, likely beyond

anything Intel will be able to put into high-volume production.

Intel officials were confident they will be able to hold off AMD from

overtaking the company's new performance bragging rights position. "The

Pentium 4 is going to be the fastest desktop platform in the world,'' said Intel

Architecture Group senior vice president Albert Yu.

The Pentium 4 features new "NetBurst'' technology that divides computing

tasks into smaller sets of instructions, and allowing the computer to complete

the total number of instructions in a shorter time. Also, the chip's system bus

will operate at 400 megahertz, allowing the transfer at speeds of 3.2 gigabytes

of data per second.