Megahurtz don't matter says Steely 3.5GHz Otellini

* THIS ARTICLE was originally filed as story 28080117.htm on the 28th of August 2001. It got borked when we moved to .net. Now it's back again through the awesome power of backup technology.

HAVING YESTERDAY unveiled the new 2GHz P4 and then today trumping that with a working 3.5GHz part, Intel has now dismissed the Gigahurtz race as an increasing irrelevance.

"We have to think beyond MHz and build better computers," was Intel general manager's Paul Otellini's essential message here at IDF this morning.

For its part, Intel believes the better computers of tomorrow will be based on technologies Otellini unveiled today. These include smarter low-power mobile processors in the shape of a chip named Banias and increased emphasis on parallelism and multiprocessor implementations under the label hyper-threading.

Hyper-threading essentially allows parallel processing on a single chip and Otellini called on the developer community to concentrate on building multi-threaded applications to make computers make better use of the processing power available on the powerful chips of tomorrow. The first Hyper-threaded products from Intel will be the Foster/Xeons planned for 2002. He said Intel would deliver the Banias processor in the first half of 2003.

At last year's IDF, Dr Albert Yu showed a 2GHz P4, and that was released yesterday. Current Intel roadmaps with customers show the P4 reaching a speed of 2.4GHz in Q2 next year, so it's reasonable to suppose we'll see the 3.5GHz processor late next year. µ

* THIS ISN'T the first time that La has said megahertz don't matter. Megahurtz don't matter if the processor is a 64-bit processor for example.