Intel has announced that it is to cease the development of its 4.0GHz Pentium processor. In July 2004, it announced that the 4.0GHz processor would not achieve its shipment dates for the end of the year, and put back the launch dated to the spring of 2005. But, for the time being, 3.8GHz is to remain the highest clock speed for the Pentium processor. Intel says that it will be transferring its engineers to work on the dual-core designs demonstrated at the recent Developer's Forum. The reason for this change in policy is probably because Intel and arch-rival AMD have been having increasingly difficult problems with producing reliable fabrications able to cope with the amount of heat generated by such high clock speeds. First AMD and now Intel have moved away from developing 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.
The clock-speed contest may be at at an end, but, for marketing purposes, Intel still needs to show that its processors are constantly improving. Hence the adoption of a new way of naming them. For more information on this subject, read this earlier story:
