Intel abandons clock speed chase and drops 4GHz Pentium

By Steve Malone

Posted on 15 Oct 2004 at 09:31

In another embarrassing admission in a year scattered with them, Intel has announced that it is to cease development of the 4GHz Pentium processor. For now the 3.8GHz part will remain the highest clock speed. Instead, the company says that it will be transferring its engineers to work on the dual core designs demonstrated at the recent Developer's Forum.

The unexpected announcement marks the end of an era for Intel. Ever since the launch of the 4.77MHz 8088 around which the original IBM PC was designed, the company has largely depended on ever increasing clock speeds to boost performance. However, recently Intel and arch-rival AMD have been having greater problems in producing reliable parts that could cope with the amount of heat generated by these clock speeds.

First AMD and now Intel have changed tack away from raw clock speed towards putting more than one processor on a single chip. Early indications show that the dual core strategy boosts performance by up to 55 per cent.

Nevertheless, the announcement will be seen as another blow to Intel's credibility at a time when it has already taken a series of knocks. In July, it announced that the 4GHz part would not hit its shipment dates for the end of the year and put back the launch dated to the spring of 2005. Now, given the increasing technical hurdles, there seems little point in spending huge amounts of money to pursue a strategy which has run its course.

For AMD, this represents a sizable opportunity. For some time, AMD has simply not been able to develop technologies such as 90nm processes fast enough to enable it to match Intel clock speeds in the market and has therefore turned to other strategies such as 64-bit processors and dual core. Now that Intel has abandoned clock speed it finds itself behind in both these areas.