Prescott - The new generation of Pentium

Intel yesterday unveiled the new version of the Pentium desktop processor architecture, bizarrely codenamed "Prescott".

The chip uses 90 nanometer technology, with microscopic transistors nearly 2/3s the size of the 0.13 micron (130 nanometer) chips that Intel has only recently started producing. Most chips currently on sale are 0.15 micron.

The initial speed of Prescott is likely to be around 4GHz. Prescott will become commercially available in the second half of 2003, Intel Architecture Group general manager Louis J Burns told the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Prescott also introduces a performance enhancement technology called 'hyper-threading' to the desktop. Hyper-threading, originally codenamed Project Jackson, has already been announced in Intel's server processors.

It effectively allows a processor to behave like two virtual processors, handling two streams of instructions in parallel, speeding up the performance of multiple computing tasks by as much as 30 per cent, Intel claims.

Intel's vice president of the Mobile Platforms Group Anand Chandrasekher announced Banias, a version of the Pentium 4 for laptops that he described as 'the first processor built from the ground up for mobile computing'.

Ron Smith, vice president Wireless Communications and Computing Group, also demoed a chip for smart phones and PDAs which he described as 'wireless internet on a chip', first announced at the 3GSM festival in Cannes last week.

It will combine an XScale processor with wireless flash memory Micro Signal Architecture on a single chip. Micro Signal architecture works like a built in phone, handling the radio communication with GPRS or 3G mobile data networks.

XScale also promises significant power savings - at 400MHz, twice the power of Intel's current StrongARM microprocessor, it consumes 2/3 the power. Operating at equivalent speed, said Smith, it consumes just 1/3 the power.

Meanwhile, Intel's rival AMD demonstrated a new product at its traditional pirate briefing a few blocks down the road from the Intel's conference in San Francisco. Codenamed Hammer, it is designed to run 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. The first desktop Hammer is due to launch next year.