Intel Clears Up Tejas Confusion

"All of our microprocessor development going forward is multicore," says Paul Otellini, Intel's president and COO. "We'll add multicore products into all our products in volume in 2005. We think that in 2006, over half of all clients—[both] notebooks and desktops—will be multicore. And servers will essentially all be multicore."

Tejas, planned as a successor to the Pentium 4-class Prescott processor, was purportedly put on hold because it would have drawn in the range of 100 watts of power, becoming difficult to cool with conventional heat-sink technology. "Thermal considerations" were at the root of what Otellini called "a hard right-hand turn" in the company's road map.

Multicore involves the placement of two separate microprocessors on a single chip, enabling computers "to parallelize existing tasks or to divide up multiple tasks," Otellini explains. For example, operating systems on PCs built around multicores will be able to divvy up tasks such as the user interface, security or the decoding of high-definition video streams to separate cores.

Intel thinks its chip strategy will also be marketable with Microsoft's next-generation operating system, due in 2006. "As Longhorn comes in, we believe the user experience on a multicore machine will be much better than on a single core machine," Otellini says.

However, one product Intel won't be emphasizing for the client PC space is a full 64-bit chip. Company officials have made it clear that Intel's existing Itanium 2 processor, aimed at the high-end server market, will remain its only entry with both 64-bit addressing and data. Intel will offer a 32/64-bit hybrid version of its Xeon processor, with 64-bit addressing and Intel's 64-bit instruction-set extensions. The hybrid Xeon, which is targeted at entry-level servers, is Intel's response to AMD's highly successful 32/64-bit Opteron.

Plans by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun to offer Opteron servers have made Intel take notice. "It raises our competitive juices to go win that business back," Otellini says. "That's one reason you're seeing an acceleration of our road map, not just in Itanium, but in 32 bits."

Intel should be able to mount a potent comeback, according to one analyst. "This is something Intel cannot back down on," says Janet Ramkissoon, principal at Quadra Capital, based in New York. "They will respond with multicore devices with 64 bits and special features like hyperthreading, so we will end up with these super microprocessors."

As for the desktop, Intel is building the capability for its 64-bit extensions into its upcoming Prescott processor. However, Intel says it won't enable the feature until Microsoft has validated a 64-bit version of Windows for Prescott. That's expected to happen later this year.

Turning to systems-level considerations, Intel also plans to help VARs make hay out of the burgeoning laptop market by placing a renewed emphasis on its whitebook program, first laid out about a year ago. "The standardization of components in that area is going to make the whitebook market bigger," says Intel CEO Craig Barrett.

Whitebooks, the notebook equivalent of "white-box" desktop machines, are seen as a particularly robust market by Intel. The company projects sales of 227 million wireless-equipped notebooks between 2004 and 2007. Further out, Intel forecasts that 30 percent of all PCs sold in 2008 will be notebooks.