Intel nixes 4 GHz Pentium 4

Staff -- Purchasing, 11/18/2004

Intel has canceled plans to release a 4 gigahertz (GHz) Pentium 4 chip that it had first said would be released by the end of the year, and then early next year.

Intel would not give a reason for the cancellation, but analysts suggest that the Pentium 4 at 4 GHz that was under development would have generated too much heat, which could harm other components on the motherboard.

Rather than focus on clock speed, Intel now says it will improve the performance of Pentium 4 chips in other ways. For instance, Intel says it plans to accelerate the introduction of dual-core chips, which contain two microprocessors in a single chip. It also plans to improve the efficiency of how chips interact with the rest of a computer system.

The company also plans to release a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4, which would be faster than its fastest Pentium 4 chip, the 3.6 GHz. The Pentium 3.8 GHz part will feature two megabytes of onboard cache memory, which is about twice the amount that today's Pentium 4 offers. There is still a possibility that Intel may release a 4 GHz version of Pentium 4, but it won't be a part of the current Prescott core.

This is the second delayed or cancelled release for Intel in three months. In July Intel delayed the release of a mobile Pentium chip code named Alviso.