Intel Delays Release of 4Ghz Chips

bizpile writes "The AP is reporting that Intel's faster version of the Pentium 4 will not be available by the end of the year as previously promised. They told PC makers this week that the 4-gigahertz chip will not ship until the first quarter of 2005. Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"

Comments

Payback is a bitch

[MikeCapone]

Intel is still paying for their decision to go with the netburst architecture IMHO.

They wanted to be able to crank the megahurtz and use that as a PR device (well, not only that but it helped them).

Of course they are also having problem with the 90nm tech (as is IBM -- I think that only AMD has been mostly clear sailing with that), but most of their problems have come from netburst and lack of competitiveness in the budget sector (Celerons get killed by much faster and cheaper AMD chips).

Re:Payback is a bitch

[NerveGas]

There's a lot more to it than just how fast of a chip they can produce. Namely, how can they make the most money?

Let's say that AMD could produce an Athlon64 4500+ right now. Would it be in their best interest to release it? Not really. The fastest chips tend to be the lowest yield - and it would greatly push down the cost of the lesser chips. Their best interest is to release a chip that's juuuuust fast enough to keep up with or beat Intel, and keep the pricing high enough to come in just a bit under intel's pricing for competitive models.

In fact, each time Intel has actually released a faster chip lately, AMD has released a faster one as if it were no trouble at all. The way they've been doing, I wouldn't be surprised if they could release faster chips if there were an economic incentive to do so.

steve

Re:Fix the Colors!

[Gleng]

Hmm, it seems that the way to fix it is to just remove the leading subdomain from the slashdot url. For example "it.", "games.", or "apple."

It seems to work in reverse too. So you can replace the "it." in this thread with "apple." to display it in the Apple colour scheme. (If you really, really wanted to)

It should be extremely easy to have an "Only use the default Slashdot colours" option in the user preferences. HINT HINT

Re:Wow.

[NanoGator]

"Does this indicate some kind of problem with the further fulfillment of Moore's law (you know, for once, Moore's law failing to apply NOW as opposed to "Moore's law will stop working in 8 months) or has this just been a bad year?"

Option #3 could be that there really isn't a killer app that requires that speed. I have difficulty imagining a lot of ppl flocking to those machines right now. It is a pity for Intel that 3d cards do more for games than cpu's.

The megaHURTz myth

[mcrbids]

Intel is now feeling some pain. They've built a brand around having more M/Ghz - which only matter superfically.

Being a multi-function device means that a CPU does multiple functions. As with ANY multi-function device, a model of CPU will do some things better than others.

X86 chips have traditionally been processing heavy, I/O weak, since hard, on-demand processing hsa been the driver of the X86 industry. (Video games, etc)

Contrast that with the Sun Sparc line of chips, or IBM's mainframe hardware, heavily optimized for I/O throughput. The needs of a rendering farm node are not well in alignment with the needs of a high-capacity file server.

Even within being "processing" demands, there is a wide, wide range. Floating point. Integer ops. Parallel proccessing. Different, even cross-compatible chips and chip lines will behave differently, performing better at some tasks than others.

But, for years now, Intel has been busy spending millions convincing the population that you can boil performance down to a single number, M/Ghz.

The cracks are beginning to show. AMD has made a solid business with "slower" (Mhz) ships that perform better. Their own Centrino line is "slower" but performs almost as well!

Intel needs to get a clue, and develop a set of benchmarks that truly show real-world performance. AMD has done quite a good job with their "+" rating. (EG, my desktop is an Athlon 2000+)

I give it 6 months, maybe a year. It'll be hard, but even Intel isn't so stupid as to put this off too long.

Errr... Speed is not Moore's 'thang'...

[Chordonblue]

Moore's 'law' doesn't guarantee speed. It merely suggests a trend that every so often (18 months - 2 years) the amount of transistors on a chip doubles. In the past, that has meant speed because thinner wires produce less heat.

The problem isn't nearly as much to do with CPU scaling for scaling's sake - those processes continue to develop at the same or similar pace. It has much more to do with scaling for speed's sake. To Intel's horror, they've found that speed isn't scaling in a linear fashion like it used to.

It must have been a terrifying discovery for the poor engineers who discovered that .09 wasn't going to get them anywhere. But imagine the culture at Intel where you daren't say anything to anyone about it, i.e. 'Just SHIP the thing!'