Intel demos 2Ghz Pentium 4

Intel yesterday demonstrated a sample of its future microprocessor line including a Pentium 4 with a record clock rate of 2Ghz.

In his keynote speech at Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) in California, Albert Yu, senior vice president and general manager of the company's architecture group, also unveiled new developments in other Intel processor families.

Several Pentium 4 demonstrations were made including one of an air-cooled Pentium 4 processor-based system running at 2Ghz.

Yu said a new Rapid Execution Engine will execute frequently used instructions at twice the clock speed of the rest of the microprocessor, and a new 400Mhz system bus will allow the Pentium 4 to input and output data three times faster than Intel's Pentium III.

He said specific attention was focused on internet, imaging, streaming video, speech, 3D, multimedia and multi-tasking applications. "The Pentium 4 will be the fastest desktop processor in the world," he claimed.

Yu also demonstrated a desktop PC with a 1.4Ghz Pentium 4 chip and 400Mhz Rambus DirectRAM. He said the new chip provides higher video frame rates and more realistic three-dimensional graphics.

Another highlight during Yu's speech was the announcement of an Itanium server cluster running Linux. He highlighted the 'fail over' capabilities of the system which can keep an application running even when one machine in the cluster goes down.

"Intel has shipped more than 6000 prototype systems and more than 18,000 Itanium processors," he said. Beta versions of Itanium processor-based systems, running Windows, HP-UX, Linux and AIX, are scheduled to ship to end users in the fourth quarter.

Yu also announced that a 1Ghz Pentium III Xeon chip for servers is available now, but admitted that the 1Ghz Pentium III chip for desktop PCs is still in short supply.

"We are making solid progress and marching forward," he said.