Gigahertz still counts, Otellini says 4.684 times

PAUL OTELLINI, Intel's president, delivered the first keynote speech at the biannual Developer Forum today and pushed a .13 micron processor to 4.684GHz.

He also showed demos of two Banias machines from NEC and Gateway, and an Itanium system equipped with Madison 6MB cache 64-bit processors.

But those demos did not come until the end of his presentation, which followed the theme of convergence and included a bijou appearance by Microsoft's resident rock star Jim Allchin, touting the benefits of tablet PCs and handwriting recognition. This software makes your PC look much like the new notebook we bought in Frys yesterday for 79 cents.

Otellini's main theme was convergence in computing, and he rolled out a developer initiative called Software College, which, in 2003, will produce integrated software development kits which would allow the creation of apps to work on a number of different devices, including PCs, PDAs and the like.

Otellini also announced an initiative called La Grande which appears to be the hardware complement of Microsoft's Palladium and which won't be used, in any case, until the Pentium 4 architecture expires and another chip takes its place.

Otellini said the industry was changing and products that had wireless connectivity as well as computing power would form the third era of IT, following on from mainframes and desktops.

Intel would drive convergence through integration of many different functions on a single chip, using process technology such as strained silicon, 90 nanometer technology and other manufacturing tweaks.

Such a billion transistor chip would include PAN, Bluetooth, UWB, LAN 802.11a, b, g, and h; WAN, 2.5G and 4G. He said: "We're already developing a one billion transistor microprocessor. This is not rocket science."

Banias notebooks, he said, will include 802.11a and 11b integrated into the chipset. This is the Calexico kit we've reported on before.

The .13 micron processor clocked up to 4.684GHz uses current technology, Otellini claimed. He confirmed that the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 will include hyperthreading and said that this technology already gave a 30 per cent boost to servers and workstations. On desktops, hyperthreading can supply up to 25% extra performance on existing applications, he claimed.

Intel demoed two 3.06GHz P4s, one with hyperthreading enabled and the other without, running several different sorts of software. It's hard to be sure, but the one that was supposed to be HT enabled looked like it was performing far far faster than 25%.

By next year he said, performance desktop chips using hyperthreading will represent 25 per cent of units shipped, 60% of workstations and over 80% of 32-bit server products.

Interestingly, he inadvertently revealed that Intel expected to ship 80 million Pentium 4s during 2003, because he said those 25% of desktops represented 20 million PCs.

The Madison demos showed the beast, due out next year, and Intel claimed it would perform between 30% and 50% better than the McKinley at the same 1GHz clock frequency.

Otellini said that he thought megahertz would always be a distinguishing feature in desktop microprocessors. Interestingly, Intel is not positioning Banias notebook technology on pure megahertz. Rather, said Otellini, this chip would include performance, longer battery life, and different form factors.