Well, we don’t have any doubts that the first Pentium 4 processors made with 0.13micron manufacturing technology will be officially announced on the coming Monday. January 7, 2002 (in fact, it was a mistake of Silicon Strategies, as we didn’t discover any specific trick of Intel’s here, see this news story for details). The processor prices , which we have told you about here, have also been confirmed: Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2.2GHz will cost $562 in 1,000-unit quantities, and Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2GHz - $364.
And in the meanwhile, waiting for this announcement we come across some very interesting info about the production cost of Pentium 4 processors, which has been kept secret by Intel all this time. Kevin Krewell, analyst from Microprocessor Report, mentioned that the production cost of the 0.18micron processor makes around ... $100 (214sq.mm die size). This is a really huge sum for Intel, especially taking into account that the slowest models are selling for $133 in 1,000-unit quantities. Luckily, the shift to a new 0.13micron manufacturing technology will cause Pentium 4 production to get significantly cheaper. According to Mr. Krewell, Northwood die size will make 145sq.mm and its production cost will drop nearly twice: down to $55 per unit (some other sources claim that Northwood die size will be 116sq.mm, though this number seems less realistic to us than the first one, because Northwood will have a twice as large L2 cache anyway).
Of course, this tangible reduction of the production cost should increase the revenues from the Intel’s CPU business and provide more room for maneuvers in the price wars with AMD.