Intel unleashes Prescott

Intel released the first major revision to its Pentium 4 processor in two years with the introduction of four new processors based on Intel’s 90-nanometer Prescott core this week.

The chips are Intel’s first 90-nanometer products to hit the market. With Prescott, Intel has more than doubled the number of transistors housed on a Pentium 4 chip, said Tim Thraves, desktop marketing manager at Intel.

The Prescott processors arrived at 3.4GHz, 3.2GHz, 3GHz, and 2.8GHz, speeds that overlap current Northwood Pentium 4 processors. If available at the same clock speed, chips will be branded by their core. For example, the 3.4GHz Prescott chip will be known as the 3.4E GHz Pentium 4, whereas the Northwood — with its 800MHz system bus — will be branded as the 3.4C GHz Pentium 4, Thraves said.

Prescott’s smaller chip size allows Intel to cut more chips from a silicon wafer than has been possible with Northwood. This cuts Intel’s manufacturing costs per chip, so Intel will rapidly shift customers to Prescott to take advantage of the lower costs.

Most of the major PC vendors — including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony — plan to have systems equipped with the new chips beginning this week. But analysts do not expect corporate customers to reap the benefits immediately, given that business customers tend to hold off on purchasing new technologies, said Roger Kay, vice president of client computing at IDC.

Intel plans to bring Prescott to 4GHz by the end of the year, Kay said. At that point, the chips launched this week will have come down in price and will be more attractive to corporate buyers, he said.

Prescott also brings more level 2 cache, offering 1MB of cache as opposed to the 512KB found in the Northwood Pentium 4 chips.

But one change that usually comes along with a new processing technology, lower power consumption, will not accompany Prescott: The four new chips use between 90 and 115 watts, more than the high-end Northwood Pentium 4 chips consume, Thraves said.

Normally, advances in processing technology allow chip manufacturers to reduce the amount of power consumed by a chip. IBM recently disclosed documentation that shows it cut the power consumption of its 90-nanometer PowerPC chips in half. But any power savings for the new generation of Intel chips will be taken up by the expanded cache and new instructions, Thraves said.

Analysts have expressed concerns about heat dissipation at this process size, when electrons can leak out of the chip because the feature sizes are so thin.

Intel also released a faster version of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, as well as a faster Northwood Pentium 4 processor. The 3.4GHz Extreme Edition chip will be the highest performing chip in Intel’s arsenal and is targeted at technical users that demand high performance.