Intel blew it on 4GHz Pentium 4, Otellini says

IN A QUESTION and answer session during an internal webcast, Paul Otellini, Intel's president, was asked why the 4GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor was killed. The questioner asked: "Why was the 4GHz processor killed. What's the scoop? Did we just blow it again?"

Otellini answered that question by saying that at one level Intel had to say that yes, it did blow it. It had the 4GHz Pentium 4 in its road map and it pulled it off the roadmap.

But that didn't mean Intel wasn't capable of producing a 4GHz Pentium 4. It was. But, Otellini told Intel's worldwide staff, it was pulled because the company intended to get back to a 90 per cent confidence level on both its schedules and its road maps.

Intel doesn't have infinite resources and had to make choices.

He said it was more important for Intel to move to 2MB cache processors and to get to dual core chips faster. Intel would have to have done another stepping for the Prescott core to get to 4GHz and 4.2GHz and that would have been counterproductive "in the grand scheme of things".

Intel is now marketing performance to include features and not just gigahertz, he said. µ

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