Intel abandon plans for 4GHz Pentium 4s
Intel is dumping plans to release a Pentium 4 processor that runs at 4GHz, saying it will boost performance on next year's chips using other means than clock speed.
The chip company said it plans to brief PC manufacturers this week on the latest changes to its processor road map. The main change is that the 4GHz Pentium 4 -- scheduled for release early next year and originally due out at the end of 2004 -- won't come out at all now.
Instead, Intel will boost performance on its chips by increasing the size of the cache, a pool of memory located on the processor for rapid data access. Current mainstream Pentium 4s now have 1MB cache. In the future, these chips will have 2MB of cache, like Intel's Xeon server chips and the "Extreme Edition" Pentium 4s designed for gaming PCs.
Intel will continue to come out with Extreme Edition chips by boosting the bus speed and cache size, said Bill Kirby, director of platform marketing at Intel.
The first mainstream Pentium 4 with 2MB of cache will run at 3.8GHz and come out early next year, an Intel representative said. Larger caches will then cascade down the Pentium 4 product line, the representative added.
