Intel previews Prescott, Dothan

NEW YORK – Intel demonstrated its next-generation desktop and notebook processors before a crowd of analysts and media here at its spring analyst event Thursday, and discussed its strategies for bringing Intel silicon into a majority of the world’s computers and communications devices.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett and president and COO Paul Otellini joined forces on stage at the Equitable Center Auditorium in midtown Manhattan to demonstrating “Prescott” and “Dothan,” the next-generation desktop and notebook processors, on the PC game Neverwinter Nights. Otellini and Barrett teamed up against four large monsters; Barrett claimed credit for most of the slaying.

Prescott and Dothan will be Intel’s first products built on its 90-nanometer process technology, which allows the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company to shrink the wires on a chip and increase the number of transistors. This was the first public demonstration of Prescott, which is expected to be released later this year, Otellini said.

The company also showed the same game running on a PDA (personal digital assistant) using an Intel XScale processor, and a cell phone using Manitoba, Intel’s product for handsets. Intel is striving to lead the market for silicon in just about every computer product released over the next decade, from PCs to phones to PDAs, and the ability to easily port the same application for different devices will speed that growth, Otellini said.

Intel will achieve that market position by continuing to lead the market for PC processors, and expanding its reach even further into cell phones, PDAs, and large high-performance servers, Otellini said.

“The desire for advanced technology is alive and well,” Barrett said. “We don’t think the importance of IT and innovation has slowed down.”

Otellini took a rare dig at rival chip vendor AMD’s (Advanced Micro Devices’) new Opteron chip, which has captured much attention for its ability to handle both 32-bit applications and 64-bit applications at competitive speeds. Intel’s Prescott chip will have the same amount of cache as Opteron, but with half the die size, he said. Prescott is designed for the desktop, while Opteron is seen as a server or high-end workstation chip.

The company propped up its maligned Itanium 2 processor, which has suffered from a lack of demand, and the recent discovery of a bug that can cause the expensive computers it powers to crash in certain situations. The number of companies that are offering Itanium 2 systems continues to increase, and recent benchmark results show the chip has “world-class performance,” Otellini said.

Intel announced that 16 Dell servers clustered together and each with two Madison Itanium 2 processors recently edged out a 32-processor system from IBM Corp. running 1.7GHz Power4+ processors in the Linpack HPC benchmark. The Linpack benchmark is used to rank the world’s fastest supercomputers, and is a measure of “the performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations. … It is not a measure of overall system performance, as no single number ever can,” according to the Top500.org Web site.

Earlier on Thursday, Barrett reaffirmed Intel’s second-quarter revenue guidance, and called for the IT community to reinvest in technology in order to remain competitive.