Intel demonstrated its 0.13-micron "Northwood" Pentium 4 core at IDF and said it plans to bring up its 0.13-micron process technology in the first quarter of 2002. The Northwood core will be used first in mobile processors and then in desktop implementations, the company said.

In a keynote address, Intel executive vice president Paul Otellini showed a functional 3.5-GHz Pentium 4, while a full demonstration ran under Windows on a machine clocked at 3 GHz.

Otellini included a glimpse at Intel's Banias project, aimed at a new generation of mobile processors. Centered at Intel's Israel Design Center, the Banias work will yield products starting in 2003, Otellini said.

Mooly Eden, the Banias project manager, appeared in a video feed to outline the three main goals of the project. The Banias design team will resize transistors in certain circuits to reduce power consumption, introduce aggressive clock-gating technology to put unneeded circuits to sleep, and implement the fusing of operations so that certain instructions can be combined into a single operation.

"With architectural microfusion, we can reduce the number of operations by using multiple instructions together," Eden said.

Otellini said power consumption also is key for server and desktop processors. By 2005, fully two-thirds of all servers will be in rack-mounted or blade designs.

The Intel executive said the McKinley implementation of the Itanium architecture, with 220 million transistors, will include more functional units than the original Merced design, moving from nine to 11 issuing units, and from four to six integer units. During the keynote, a four-way McKinley server was demonstrated with various error correction modes put to the test.

Otellini said he believes the enterprise sector of the computing market — at which Itanium is aimed — represents the "single greatest revenue opportunity for Intel.

"The trend toward e-business is not dead," Otellini said. "Corporations will continue to invest in enterprise systems because e-business still represents the most efficient way to do business."

The multiprocessing trend seen in servers and workstations may reach the desktop in a few years. In the meantime, Intel is promoting what it calls hyperthreading technology, in which a single processor can run more than one thread. The Pentium 4 can handle three instructions per clock cycle, and Itanium is able to process six.

Otellini said that the next step beyond instruction-level parallelism is thread-level parallelism, in which a single processor can handle two or more threads. While the Pentium 4 includes extra registers and other hardware hooks to support multiple threads, Otellini exhorted the software community to support TLP in operating systems, drivers and applications.

For graphical rendering and other compute-intensive applications, Otellini said that "hyperthreading can provide much of the benefit of multiprocessing. It is as if there were multiple processors on a single chip."

Acknowledging that the personal computer market is in the doldrums, particularly in the United States, Otellini said that the Pentium 4, coupled with Microsoft's introduction of the XP operating system, will help fuel renewed buying.

Joe Osha, semiconductor analyst at Merrill Lynch Securities, said he doubted whether corporate America will embrace Windows XP.

"I asked the Microsoft people to show me what XP could do for an IT manager in business. They showed me how easy it was to send a video, but I don't think many business users are interested in sending out video," Osha said. "For mainstream business applications, there isn't much to entice people. On the other hand, many businesses are going to upgrade their systems next year, and the P4 is going to be the processor platform."

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