Intel Corporation is rumoured to continue its tradition of making important announcements at the end of the year with the introduction of Tejas chips late next year. According to a report at The Inquirer, the company will reveal its second 90nm design currently code-named as Tejas in the fourth quarter to 2004, roughly in 14 months from now.

It is reported that the code-named Prescott hotties will achieve “only” 3.80GHz speed by the end of the second quarter of next year, while throughout the whole 1H of 2004, the Prescott chips will be available at 2.80, 3.0, 3.20, 3.40 and 3.60GHz speeds. I remind you that at the launch in November this year Intel will release 3.40 and 3.20GHz Prescott CPUs to address high-end market segments. The 3.60GHz processor is expected to come in the first quarter and a little bit later the semiconductor giant will release lower-speed 2.80 and 3.00GHz processors with 1MB of L2 cache, some important architectural improvements as well as 1MB of L2 cache.

The Tejas are meant to be the last play in the whole NetBurst family, as far as I remember Intel’s long-term roadmaps. However, the processor may also live the longest live among all breeds of the original Willamette. The first Tejas microprocessor or microprocessors, probably at 4.0GHz speeds, will be released late next year and will be made using 90nm fabrication process. In late 2005 or early 2006 Intel will transfer the Tejas chips to its 65nm technology process on order to push the clock-speeds up once again. After the Tejas the company plans to unveil its processors code-named Nehalem that will not utilise the pure NetBurst, but, as everybody assumes these days, will provide something brand-new.

According to Intel’s plans, all Prescott chips will use the 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, only Tejas processors will migrate to 1066MHz PSB. Based on the fact that platforms for Intel Prescott processors will support dual-channel DDR-II SDRAM at 533MHz memory, we may suggest that the company wants Tejas chips to be compatible with Socket T infrastructure for Prescott microprocessors, like it wanted the first Prescott to be compatible with the latest Socket 478 “Northwood” CPUs.