INTEL users still hope for 4GHZ

Sadly, one year after INTEL cancelled the 4GHZ Pentium 4, some INTEL users at dell.com still hope for a 4GHZ Pentium.

Right now, INTEL's Pentium 4 processors are basically sold at overclocked frequencies. Their heat production is around 130-200 watts, and they have to use massive heatsinks and employ a technique called thermal throttling to reduce CPU speed when overheating is detected. In comparison, AMD CPUs consume up to 100 watts less. According to the Tomshardware testing, a system with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ consumes a total of 203 watts at max load, a system with INTEL's next generation Pentium EE 955 (Presler) CPU made at a 65nm process consumes 289 watts at 3.46GHZ. The Presler 3.46GHZ CPU consumes 86 watts more, which indicates that the Presler 3.46GHZ produces almost 200 watts of heat( X2 4800+ is 110 watts, 110+ 86= 196). When clocked to 4GHZ, the Presler system consumes 307 watts.

When INTEL released the Paxville Xeon CPU, it has to redesign the platform to support heavier heatsinks. When Tomshardware tried to do a stress test on dual core Pentium D, the extreme heat from the INTEL CPU burnt several motherbards in a row. According to a white paper by rackable, heat affects overall system reliability and service life substantially. While a hot processor may run well for months, it can cause system to fail miserably afterwards.

In fact, to solve the heat production problem, INTEL has decided to abandon clock speed altogether. In 2006, all those 3.x GHZ Pentium 4 chips will be phased out, and will be replaced by more honest CPUs with shorter pipelines and lower frequencies. While the Pentium 4 has 31 pipeline stages to jack up frequency, the Merom core is expected to have a 14 stage pipeline and 2GHZ frequency.