Paul Otellini, the president of Intel Corporation, confirmed at IDF that the company will start using a kind of rating for their future processors. It is now officially stated that the biggest CPU-manufacturer in the world will introduce another metrics apart from the core-clock speed.

Nowadays Intel with its flagman Pentium 4 processor is “ahorse”. The working frequencies of the Pentium 4 processor with its long pipeline grow really fast, and this feature is an indisputable trump of Intel. However, in case of CPUs based on other architectures the company may find out that their working frequencies appear considerably lower than those of Pentium 4 CPUs even though their performance will be higher. Moreover, the clock-speed and performance are not the most important characteristic of processors intended to use in mobile computers and handheld devices.

In early 2003 Intel unveils their brand-new Banias processors designed specially for notebooks. As we have reported numerous times, Banias chips will be clocked lower than the Pentium 4-M CPUs, nevertheless, thanks to some architecture advantages and 1MB of L2 cache, the newcomers will be able to offer almost the same level of performance. Since Banias based platforms are aimed on a bit different market segment than the Pentium 4-M powered ones, Intel will have to explain the customers why Banias work at lower frequencies and the difference between “Mobile Internet PC” and “Transportable Notebook” concepts. In this case, Intel will have to introduce a new way of measuring processor’s performance and also the correlation between the clock-speed and working time.

According to Mr. Otellini, the rating offered by Intel will take into account not only the performance, but also the time the platform based on the CPU can work without recharging the battery. Although I have no idea how Intel is going to calculate their numbers, it is clear that the metrics offered by the CPU-giant will be totally different from what AMD uses.