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Intel Corp. released the first major revision to the Pentium 4 processor in two years with the introduction of four new processors based on its 90 nanometer Prescott core Sunday.
The chips are also Intel´s first 90 nanometer products to hit the market. One of the benefits of shrinking chip manufacturing technologies is the ability to put more transistors on a smaller chip, and Intel was able to more than double the amount of transistors from the current Northwood Pentium 4 core, said Tim Thraves, desktop marketing manager for Intel.
˝We think this is an industry milestone,˝ said Bill Siu, vice president and general manager of Intel´s Desktop Platforms Group.
The new processors arrived at 3.4GHz, 3.2GHz, 3GHz, and 2.8GHz, speeds that overlap current Pentium 4 processors. If two chips with different cores are available at the same clock speed, the Prescott chip will be known as the 3.4E GHz Pentium 4, while a Northwood chip with an 800MHz system bus gets the 3.4C GHz brand, Thraves said.
Prescott´s smaller chip size also allows Intel to cut more chips from a silicon wafer than is possible with the Northwood core. This cuts Intel´s manufacturing costs per chip, and Intel will rapidly shift its customers to Prescott in order to take advantage of the lower costs.
Most of the major PC vendors plan to have systems available with the new chips as of Sunday, including Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Sony Corp. Prescott is suited for both business and consumer PCs, but contains 13 new instructions that help improve the performance of multimedia applications such as video, Thraves said.
One of those instructions will boost the performance of three-dimensional graphics when Intel´s next-generation Grantsdale chipset is released later this year, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research Inc. in Cave Creek, Arizona. A new data format that enables the processor to perform matrix math is a clear indication that Grantsdale and Prescott will help improve Intel´s integrated graphics, he said.
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