- Executive vice president Paul Otellini said that the company will continue to invest in the development, manufacturing and process technologies that will allow it to dominate in terms of microprocessor speeds, adding that
the Pentium 4 will scale to 10Ghz during its lifetime.
Intel planned the Pentium 4 to be able to scale all the way up to 10GHz. To do that, they used a massive 20-stage pipeline, a size unheard of compared to other models at the time. This pipeline, while a weakness at lower speeds, will enable the Pentium 4 to scale to very high MHz speeds.
The dilemma Intel faced with the early Pentium 4 chips was that the long pipeline and the overall architecture designed to scale to massive MHz performed poorly against properly scaled Pentium III and Athlon architectures. A 1.3GHz Pentium III performs about 20% faster than a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. The original Pentium 4 design called for bigger caches, a stronger floating point, and other niceties, but such things were yanked due either to limits of the .18 micron process or because they were seen as unnecessary obstacles to boosting the chip speed up to 10GHz...
The fourth quarter of this year will see Intel release their 3.06GHz Pentium 4.
Intel will be releasing a 3.20GHz iteration of Prescott, their 90 nanometer processor, during the second quarter of 2003, according to their latest roadmaps. Intel will also be introducing a 3.20GHz Pentium 4 at around the same time.
10Ghz ALU running
Intel Prescott prospects