Prescott will be based on the same basic NetBurst architecture of the Pentium 4, but will come with a number of improvements, Burns said. The chip will come with 1MB of cache, twice as much as current Pentium 4s, and 13 new instructions -- computing pathways for handling specific tasks such as multimedia processing. The chip, which is being shown off at the conference in a concept PC with two screens code-named Marble Falls, will also come with an enhanced version of hyperthreading -- a technology introduced late last year to the Pentium 4 -- and an 800MHz bus, the data path between the processor and the outside world. Current Pentium 4 chips come with a 533MHz bus, which will soon be accelerated to 800MHz. Tejas, coming a year later, will add further improvements to Prescott. Tejas will first appear in a PC code-named Powersville, which will feature PCI express interconnections. Burns declined to provide further details on Prescott or Tejas. One feature Prescott won't have, though, is LaGrande, a technology to prevent outsiders from snooping on hard drives. At the last Developer Forum, Intel President Paul Otellini said that Prescott would come with LaGrande. Executives are now saying, however, that the circuitry to enable LaGrande will be in the chip, but will only be activated in future versions, possibly two to three years from now. The problem is that operating systems need to tweak their software to take advantage of it, and Microsoft has not done so yet, said Mike Fister, general manager of Intel's enterprise platforms group. In notebooks, Intel reiterated that Centrino, a family of chips for laptops, will come out on 12 March. So far, the acceptance of the chip among PC makers is high. "We have more design wins for Centrino by a factor of four than we had with Pentium 4 at this time," said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of the mobile products division at Intel. Centrino notebooks will also last longer on a single battery charge, he said. Benchmark tests indicate that a 1.6GHz Centrino notebook can run 318 minutes on a single battery charge, or just over five hours. Chandrasekher also showed off Newport, a notebook that will be similar to laptops appearing in 2004. Among other features, the systems come with a small screen on the outside of the notebook case that allows people to check e-mail or send messages. The design has percolated in the lab since 2001.
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