Pentium 4 PCs - full details

Within a few hours of Intel announcing shipment of its Pentium 4 processor, a flood of hardware vendors including IBM, Dell and Compaq raced to unveil their respective PCs sporting the chip.

Many of the Pentium 4 computers will initially be targeted at the consumer market. First among those will be Dell's Dimension 8100. Dell said the PC will be "optimised for home theatre" and will ship with a Sony Trinitron monitor, and DVD and CD-RW drives.

Compaq will add a Pentium 4-based Presario 7000T to its range of so-called family internet PCs. The machine features a 1.4Ghz processor, 128Mb of memory, a 20Gb hard drive, 40X speed CDRom and Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition operating system.

Compaq will also begin shipping Compaq Deskpro Workstation 300 and Deskpro EXS models with the Pentium 4 in mid-December.

Gateway will offer three consumer systems: the Performance 1400, 1500 and 1500XL. Performance 1400 will feature the 1.4Ghz Pentium 4 processor, while the other two will house the 1.5Ghz chip.

IBM, which will incorporate the chip into its NetVista PCs and single-processor workstations, unveiled its NetVista A60 and A60i desktop PCs as its first Pentium 4 models due to ship next month.

The company will combine Pentium 4's multimedia, video and audio functions with ATI's Radeon All-in-Wonder graphics card.

Hewlett Packard (HP) has included Pentium 4 across its HP Pavillion and HP Vectra product consumer and business lines. The micro-processor will initially be featured in the company's Pavillion 9795C home PC and the Vectra v1800 business desktop PC.

The Pentium 4 is the first redesign of Pentium since Pentium Pro debuted in 1995. It uses a 400Mhz system bus and offers 256Kb of onboard cache memory.

The processor uses Intel's NetBurst micro-architecture, which aims to improve performance by including new methods of data caching and enabling some parts of the chip to run at twice the clock rate.

However, some analysts said mainstream users do not need the additional power and features of the latest chip, although high-end users may want to consider it as an immediate option.

Paul Otellini, general manager of Intel's architecture group, said: "The Pentium 4 processor is designed to give users performance where they can appreciate it most whether streaming content, playing interactive games, encoding video and MP3 files or creating internet content."

Intel is also negotiating with a number of third-party chipset manufacturers to license elements of the technology.