Intel to ring in 2004 with delayed Prescott launch

Any expectations that Intel Corp.'s next-generation Prescott processor will make an appearance in 2003 are fading fast as the year winds to a close. The chip had been expected to make its debut in the fourth quarter, but only a select number of PC manufacturers will get their hands on Intel's first 90-nanometer processor before 2004.

Prescott is an update to the current Pentium 4 processor. It will come with double the cache of current Pentium 4 chips with up to 1M byte of Level 2 cache, and will also contain 13 new instructions that improve the performance of video encoding and floating-point applications, among other things.

In the first half of the year, at the Spring Intel Developer Forum and the company's spring analyst meeting, Intel executives indicated that Prescott would ship this year. But as the second half of the year rolled around, Intel changed its guidance to say that it would ship the chip "for revenue" in the fourth quarter.

Prescott is currently in production at Intel's fabs, said George Alfs, an Intel spokesman. The Santa Clara, California, company will record revenue from shipments of Prescott in the fourth quarter, he said.

The slip in the launch date can probably be attributed to problems Intel has experienced in supplying enough power to compensate for increased performance and current leakage, which required additional time to make sure the company could support the higher thermal characteristics of Prescott, said Kevin Krewell, senior editor of the Microprocessor Report in San Jose, California.

Normally when chip companies roll out new process technologies to their manufacturing lines, they benefit from a decrease in power consumption for a new chip that runs at the same clock speed as a chip based on the older technology, Krewell said.

In this case, it's not clear that Intel will see a decrease in power consumption in part due to problems associated with transistor leakage at 90 nanometers, he said. As processors get smaller, the widths of the wires inside the chip shrink to the point where electrons can escape through the interconnects and leak out as heat.

There is a direct relationship between faster clock speeds and greater power consumption. The current performance leader in Intel's mainstream processor line is the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, which is designed to consume a maximum of 82 watts. The Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition consumes 92 watts, but is only available in limited quantities.

Since Prescott also has more cache and more instructions than the current Pentium 4 generation, "they've spent their power savings" that would accompany the jump to 90 nanometers, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research Inc. in Cave Creek, Arizona.

The additional performance requirements, coupled with the increases in current leakage, make for a chip that will probably consume more power than previous generation chips at equal clock speeds, Krewell said.

At the Fall Intel Developer Forum, the company warned motherboard makers that they would need to design boards sold in 2004 to handle a maximum thermal envelope of 110 watts, Krewell said. Intel President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini has said that Intel plans to hit 4GHz with the Prescott chips by the end of 2004, a target that will likely require that much power, he said.