Desktop chips 'to hit 15GHz by 2010'

LUCKY PUNTERS WILL BE ABLE TO BUY 15GHZ INTEL CHIPS, containing a billion transistors, by the end of the decade, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel veep and CTO in his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in Tokyo today. Gelsinger also predicted that PDAs will hit 5GHz in the same timeframe. It's unlikely the chips will use the existing Pentium 4 architecture which is reckoned to only be good up to around 10GHz.

"You would look at a major micro-architecture like the Pentium 4 and it is typically five to eight years that you would operate on that same micro-architecture until you would introduce a major new one," Gelsinger told PC Advisor. "So while I expect that timeline to be fairly similar, we have not laid out a specific new major micro-architecture step that we will be taking.

"Desktops today are 75 to 100 watts, and when you go to handheld devices you are typically operating at less than 1 watt," he added. "Obviously, you are optimising the design for different criteria. So today, if I was going to look at a StrongArm or XScale core, could I create a 2GHz or 3GHz XScale today? Absolutely. Could I do so and deliver the best trade-off of power and performance inside a 1-watt envelope? No. You tend to design the chips differently to live inside different devices." µ

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