News:
For the first time in five years, Intel Corp. will make a major change in the plumbing of its chips by switching to a new design that promises better performance and lower power consumption than today’s Pentium 4
The world’s largest chip maker will announce the architecture this month at a conference in San Francisco, spokesman Bill Calder said Thursday. Chips based on the new architecture are expected to debut in the second half of 2006.
The technology will replace the Netburst architecture that appeared in late 2000 with the Pentium 4 and enabled a path to higher processing frequencies. At the time, Intel hoped that it could boost performance by ratcheting up the speed of the chips.
Intel new architecture is expected to be based in part on Intel’s Pentium M, which was developed to deliver performance and power savings in notebook computers. It also has roots in the Pentium III processor that Intel launched in 1999.
Like AMD’s chips, the Pentium M’s top clock speed is lower than the Pentium 4, which currently tops out at 3.8 gigahertz.