SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. contends its new Pentium 4 processor and double-data rate (DDR) chip set will help revive the sluggish PC market as consumers embrace their multimedia capabilities. As expected, Intel today formally introduced its 2.2-GHz Pentium 4, which is fabricated with 0.13-micron technology, and DDR chip set (see today's story).
According to Intel, some 450 million PCs in use today run at 700 MHz or less -- not enough to handle MP3 files, streaming video on the Internet, recordable DVDs, and online gaming.
"The upgrade cycle has already started," said Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group. "As the market grows again, it will be P4 based. I'm not saying the market will double in 2002, but it will quickly transition to P4."
Though only slightly faster than existing 2-GHz chips, the difference in the new 0.13-micron P4 processor is "far more than just another couple megahertz," Burns argued.
By moving the P4 architecture from 0.18-micron to a finer process geometry, Intel is able to achieve improvements in both speed and power draw, as well as to double the cache size to 512 Kbytes, Burns said.
Perhaps more significantly, he said, the new process effectively doubles the number of die produced per silicon wafer, reducing manufacturing cost, thus allowing Intel to target multiple market tiers with one high-performance device.
The simultaneous release today of Intel's awaited 845D chip set with support for DDR synchronous DRAM rounds out the multi-segment approach, providing three different memory interfaces. Intel also markets chip sets for SDRAM and Direct Rambus DRAM.
"Whatever price point people want to buy at, I'm giving them," Burns said at a press conference on Friday in Burlingame, Calif., prior to today's introduction.
Regarding the claim by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. that its new Athlon runs faster than Intel's offering (see today's story), Burns said that "[The P4] is unequivocally the fastest thing on the planet, benchmarks will show that. It's about the future with a new architecture, not the extension of an old one."
