Intel CPU Hits 2 GHz

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA -- Intel showed off its upcoming Pentium 4 processor with several graphics-heavy demonstrations, then revved one of the chips to 2 GHz Tuesday at the opening keynote of the Intel Developer Forum.

During a demonstration to show the power of the P4, Albert Yu, senior vice president and general manager for the Intel architecture group, giggled merrily as he tapped his fingers on a touch-screen monitor that displayed a virtual pool of water. The resulting ripples looked amazingly real, thanks in part to the P4's capabilities, he said.

The P4, scheduled to ship at 1.4-GHz and 1.5-GHz speeds in the fourth quarter of this year, is also adept at handling other multimedia and Internet tasks, he said. Yu demonstrated a P4-based system's capability to quickly encode video from a camera to a PC. Running next to a PIII-based system, the P4 system flew through the task, providing fluid video motion and handily beating the PIII system.

Starting From Scratch

Yu ran down a laundry list of new features on the P4, a 42-million transistor chip he said started on "a blank piece of paper." Its NetBurst micro-architecture is Intel's first new micro-architecture since the Pentium Pro in 1995.

The new micro-architecture includes several new technologies, he said. A hyperpipelined technology doubles the processor's pipeline depth to 20 stages from the PIII's 10 stages. A rapid execution engine runs the processor's Arithmetic Logic Units at twice the core frequency. A new 400-MHz system bus provides 3.2-gigabytes-per-second transfer speeds to Rambus memory. And a new Execution Trace Cache--an advanced version of L1 cache--supplements the chip's 256KB of on-die L2 cache.

In his last P4 demonstration, Yu showed a 1.4-GHz P4 ramp up to a speed of 2002 MHz (according to the display). Intel executives later pointed out that the chip didn't require any special cooling techniques; it was just a regular air-cooled system. An Intel spokesperson noted that 18 months ago the company demonstrated its first 1-GHz processor. Moore's Law--the precept by Intel chair emeritus Gordon Moore that computing power doubles every 18 months--remains in effect, he noted.