Intel Denies Pentium 4 E 3.0GHz Postponements

by Anton Shilov
03/01/2004 | 09:55 AM

Spokesman for Intel Corporation denied Monday a report from Asian press that the firm had postponed the shipments of the Pentium 4 E processor 3.00GHz made using the company’s 90nm strained silicon technology till April.

A report from DigiTimes web-site claimed that Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker had delayed general availability of its 90nm 3.00GHz Pentium 4 “Prescott” processors to April from the original schedule of mid-March due to production capacity constraints at its wafer foundry, citing sources among Taiwanese distributors.

“We already launched the [Intel Pentium 4 E 3.00GHz] processor and we are already shipping it in volume,” an Intel spokesperson said.

The Intel Pentium 4 E processors launched a month ago have a lot of architectural tweaks and improvements, such as 16KB L1 data cache, 1MB L2 cache as well as improved branch predictor, faster instruction execution a better data pre-fetcher as well as 13 new instructions called SSE3. The main drawback of the Prescott seems to be extremely deep pipeline which sometimes impacts its performance negatively. You can find more information on the new Pentium 4 “E” architecture in our article called “Intel Prescott: One More Willamette-like Slow Processor or a Worthy Piece?”, and get more details about the performance of Intel’s first commercial 90nm desktop chips in our “Massive Attack: Performance Tests of 14 Processors Priced at $200+” review.

At this time Intel offers Pentium 4 “Prescott” processors at 2.80GHz, 3.00GHz and 3.20GHz, while 3.40GHz speed bin for 90nm Pentium 4 will be available later in March, according to Intel.

Intel Pentium 4 processors 3.60GHz and faster will only be available in LGA775 package in the second quarter of this year, sources familiar with Intel’s plans said.