Intel Drops 4GHz Pentium 4, Plans To Focus On Platform-Level Upgrades

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant will assign resources that would have gone into a 4GHz launch into other critical areas, including its rollout next year of dual-core processors as well as its increasingly complex lineup of chipsets and other system building blocks, a spokesman said.

Intel executives have just begun the process of telling their customers, the spokesman said.

The move is the second--and final--shot for the planned 4GHz chip. Earlier this year, Intel said it would delay a planned late-2004 rollout of the high-clockspeed Pentium 4 processors amid a series of inventory, market and internal execution issues. At about the same time, Intel President Paul Otellini began discussing more widely his vision of Intel as a platform company rather than a chip company.

The platform-level approach has already led to Intel's highly successful Centrino mobile product line--a platform that combines a mobile processor, chipset and extended battery performance into a single box. Intel's mobile line, led by Centrino, is now its fastest-growing product set.

Still, the move is one more decision Intel executives will be forced to explain to customers and the overall market. In addition to the initial delay and now cancellation of its 4GHz Pentium 4, Intel has had a significant running inventory imbalance since midyear and was stymied briefly by a technical issue on its vaunted Grantsdale chipset.

Intel executives, including Otellini, have said they expect that accelerating their plans for dual-core processors will produce significant benefits in the long term. Executives say they also expect the company's growing focus on technology such as HyperThreading, security-enhancing LaGrande Technology and, eventually, multi-core processors will help in this effort.

While Intel will not ship a 4GHz Pentium 4, the spokesman said, it does have a release of a 3.8GHz version of the chip that could be out by 2005. In addition, Intel plans to launch a new version of its 64-bit Itanium 2 processor later in the fourth quarter, he said.