Intel yesterday showed off its latest processor release, the Northwood-based 2.2GHz Pentium 4.
Callum Chisholm, channel business manager at Intel, says the 2.2GHz offers significant speed advantages and is expected to be taken up by both early adopter corporate and consumer users.
Ideally targeted at multimedia users, the 2.2GHz is significantly faster in rendering tasks and outperforms same-speed non-Northwood Pentium 4s by more than 10%, says Intel. Northwood-based processors will be available from 1.6GHz upwards.
Speed gains in the new 2.2GHz design are largely the result of squeezing more transistors onto the chip - the new 2.2GHz has 55 million transistors as opposed to the original Pentium 4`s 42 million. Other speed gains are achieved through the larger 512KB level 2 cache and the use of 0.13 micron technology, reducing overall size of the processor by 30%.
"Power consumption is also down," says Chisholm. "The Northwood consumption has been brought down from 75 watts to 55 watts over previous generations." He adds that the 845 chipset now also supports DDR memory in addition to supporting SDRAM, a change in response to user feedback. The 850 chipset is also available for users wanting to use the high-end RDRAM memory.
Upgrade paths for users of Pentium 4 products have also been ensured with both Willamette and Northwood processors being 478-pin configurations. "This makes it easy for users to exchange the two. To upgrade, simply replace one with the other," says Chisholm.
Steve Nossel, South African country manager at Intel, says "the 2.2GHz is an inflection point from the Intel Pentium range," and is immediately available from all of the company`s channel partners.
According to Nossel, Intel`s expectations for the year ahead include a significant increase in server shipments. He says a lot more high-end servers could be expected to take over from mainframe installations. Web services will be high on the agenda, says Nossel. "We don`t believe that e-commerce is dead."
Other areas he sees as crucial in the year ahead are mobility, security and getting customer relationship management to work.
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