Intel ready to ship 1GHz Pentium
By John G. Spooner, ZDNet
Feb 15, 2000

Palm Springs, Calif. -- The gigahertz rush is on.

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), looking to recapture the speed crown from its chief rival, today said it plans to ship 1GHz chips by the third quarter of the year. The announcement here at the company's Intel Developer Forum was accompanied by a demonstration of two processors running at 1000MHz.

At the same time, the chip maker unveiled more details on its forthcoming "Timna" chip for low-end PCs.

"Just a year ago we were able to demonstrate the first Pentium III breaking the 1GHz barrier. Now, for the first time, we have a production-ready system," said senior vice president Albert Yu.

Yu said Intel will begin shipping limited numbers of its 1000MHz or 1GHz Pentium III chip "shortly."

That first demonstration was conducted using a specially cooled Pentium III. In this latest demonstration, Pentium III systems from Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM were on stage, indicating these companies would be ready with 1Ghz machines when the chip ships.

While Intel will hit 1GHz with its Pentium III chip, the company's planned follow-on processor will be even faster. Yu demonstrated the new chip, named for the Willamete river in Oregon, running at speeds of up to 1.5GHz.

However Yu stressed that the demonstration was based on "first silicon" the very first samples of the chip.

Double the performance
With the demonstrations, the clock speed of Intel's chips has more than doubled since last summer.

Pat Gelsinger, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Products Group, said this level of performance roughly doubles that of the 533MHz Pentium III chip. He said it would have particular relevance for users running Windows 2000 as well as new Internet protocols, such as extensible markup language or XML.

"XML is going to be critical," he said. "Does XML require performance? Yes it does."

Many analysts will be skeptical about Yu's claims of volume availability of 1GHz chips by the third quarter. However, Yu said the company will increase its manufacturing capacity in order to have six manufacturing plants, known as fabs, up and running on its 0.18 micron manufacturing process. That is an additional two Fabs, over the four Intel has up and running on 0.18 micron right now.

Willamette has speed
Willamette will be fast. Intel has not said yet how fast it will be at introduction, but the chip was demonstrated, starting at about 1.4GHz.

Willamette, demonstrated for the first time publicly at the developer forum, is of a brand new 32-bit design. The chip's design will eventually replace the Pentium III's current "P6" processor core design.

"We're going to drive this product into the performance mainstream of the desktop market," Yu said. "We will be shipping hundreds of thousands of units by the end of the year."

Willamette will require a new chip set. The chip set, code-named Tehama, will support a 400MHz system bus and dual-channel RDRAM memory. RDRAM, or Rambus memory, is a new, high-performance memory technology now being implemented by Intel in high-end PCs. The bus, which provides a data pipeline between the chip and other system components, is similar in design to the current Pentium III bus. It will be able to transfer up to 3.2GB of data per second.

Willamette will also include a new instruction set, known as single instruction multiple data or SIMD2. SIMD instruction sets allow data to be processed in parallel.

Timna targets low end
Intel will offer faster chips, but what about cheaper chips?

Intel's answer is to offer a chip designed from the ground up for the sub-$600 PC market. This chip, code named Timna for a national park in Israel, will achieve lower cost through integration of various technologies. It will combine a processor with a graphics engine and a memory controller, allowing PC makers to eliminate extra components, such as graphics boards and memory controller chips, to achieve lower cost. This chip will come in the second half.

While Intel is shooting for 1GHz and faster, it will be a while before it reaches that speed barrier. A 900MHz Pentium III chip is expected early in the second half of the year. An 866MHz chip is expected between now and the end of the first half.

The company will also transition its Celeron processor to the 0.18 micron manufacturing process by the end of the second quarter, Yu said. By the same time period, Celeron will hit 600MHz. It will hit 700MHz and faster in the second half.

Intel is also working with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Sony Corp. to ensure connectivity between PCs and consumer electronics devices, using Microsoft's universal plug and play protocol. PCs will also be able to support, in the future, Sony's Memory stick technology.

New PC designs, including a "PC that fits in the palm of your hand," were shown during the keynote.

Intel also demonstrated, for the first time, Universal Serial Bus 2.0, a new USB interface that is up to 40 times faster than the present USB 1.1.

See Also:
AMD fires up its 1.1GHz Athlon demo
IBM shows design for super-fast chip
Intel's 'Willamette' heats up GHz race
Intel execs to outline the future
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