Slashdot Mirror
Intel Scraps Plan For 4 Ghz P4 Chip
bizpile writes "It was reported earlier that Intel would be delaying the release of their 4Ghz Pentium 4 chips, but it now appears that they will be cancelling them altogether. The announcement came Thursday and Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips. Engineers are working to add additional cores to a single chip and improving the efficiency in how the chips interact with the rest of the system. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
PPC are RISC based processors.. while x86 are CISC. The difference is that RISC processors have 'hardwired' all basic instructions into them... making them capable of executing instructions in single cycle.. or even more instructions at same time. CISC processors on the other hand have programmable core. (i'm not going to explain how that works.. but closest analogy would be to internet routers.. and directing the packet to reach desired destination) This makes it more versatile and cheaper, but less efficient.