Longhorn delays don't bother Kicking Pat Gelsinger

AT A ROUND TABLE here in San Francisco today, Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer, said that the Netburst architecture in the Pentium 4 wasn't going to go away any time in the near future.

Pat was in Kicking form today, shaking Mageek's hand and dragging him across the table, but wouldn't repeat it for Mikhail Popov from Russia who wanted to make a short horror film.

Gelsinger was holding an open court where he fielded questions from around 20 journos.

Talking about future microprocessors, Gelsinger said that we will see a lot of additional Netburst processors in 2005, but did suggest that the architecture won't last quite as long as it originally thought three years ago.

Over time, he said, Intel would phase in new architecture which would very much take thermal limits into account, but that wasn't likely to happen overnight.

At this point he got hold of a journalist's Apple Powerbook and said: What is this? He handed it to an Intel PR guy and said take care of that please.

Some elements of Intel technology were already developed but were waiting for Longhorn. We asked whether Intel was frustrated by the delay but he said that it was a matter of swings and roundabouts. Microsoft, for example, was ahead on multicore technology. On the other hand technologies like Vanderpool really needed the new OS.

He said that there was a lot of pressure on Microsoft and the other software vendors to sort out licensing on multicore microprocessors.

"Customers are really putting a lot of pressure on the software vendors. Say I had eight hyperthreaded cores that appear like 16 cores. Sixteen times the licence fee? Customers are going to say you're out of your mind".