Intel Shelves Plans for 4-GHz P4
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Company will break its promise to deliver a speedier chip, shifts focus to dual-core designs. Intel has confirmed its near-term plans for its desktop processors before it reaches the multicore era.
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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ANALYST NATHAN BROOKWOOD has raised several questions about a technology announcement Intel made last week on Pentium 4 dual core processors and wonders just what technology was under the hood.
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November 01, 2004 - Intel have launched a 3.46GHz version of their gamer targeted Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Nice name guys! :P However, reviews aren&#39;t too peachy overall, check this out from C|Net: One snag
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Intel, the world&#39;s largest chip maker, scrapped a plan Thursday to enter the digital television chip business, marking a major retreat from its push into consumer electronics.
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Intel dropped prices on a range of Pentium 4 processors by up to 35 percent on Sunday. The fastest version of the chip, the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560, dropped by 35 percent from $637 to $417.
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Intel has dropped plans to turn its latest batch of chip sets into wireless access points, citing a lack of interest from PC vendors and the rising number of stand-alone access points.
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In another product postponement, semiconductor giant Intel Corp. said it won't be offering a chip for projection TVs by the end of 2004 as it had announced earlier this year.
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bizpile writes &quot;It was reported earlier that Intel would be delaying the release of their 4Ghz Pentium 4 chips, but it now appears that they will be cancelling them altogether.
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We'll show you . . . in mid-2007 In a most anti-climatic move, AMD has fought back against Intel's release of four-core processors with a demo unit.â¦
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Intel confirmed plans to release a server version of the 45-nanometer Penryn before the end of this year, but the company is releasing little information about its plans for mobile and desktop versions of the chip.
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Intel Corp. on Thursday canceled plans to introduce its highest-speed Pentium 4 chip for desktop computers, marking another in a string of unexpected product changes, cancellations and recalls at the world's largest computer chip maker.
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The world&#39;s largest chipmaker, which has had product delays, manufacturing snafus and canceled the 4-GHz version of Pentium 4, has now axed its plans to build chips for big-screen, high-definition TV sets.
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IDF Fall '04 As Intel prepares to detail its own multi-core chips
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Intel has dropped plans for 4GHz version of its flagship Pentium 4 chip, making a shift in approach.
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LV, ULV versions coming too Intel's 45nm 'Penryn' processor architecture gets ever closer, and as we near the release of the first CPUs based upon it, chip-by-chip details are beginning to leak out. The latest: Intel's plans for mobile processors.â¦
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Barcelona: 'It could have been a contender' Exclusive Intel looks set to blunt AMD's August Barcelona processor release by handing customers a 2.0GHz version of its four-core Clovertown, The Register has learned.â¦