Prescott makes play for living room

NEWS Intel will release a new desktop chip next month, kicking off what is likely to be an intense effort to get computers into the living room.

Prescott, the code name for an enhanced version of the Pentium 4 coming out on 2 February, will let Intel bridge the gap between the PC and the television by helping computers function more like VCRs than traditional desktops.

The chip itself is tweaked for multimedia, sporting new instructions for handling video and audio files, a larger 1MB cache, and faster chip speeds that will start at around 3.4GHz and go to 4GHz later in the year. Security features designed to thwart attacks will also be enabled with an update of Windows XP coming in the second quarter.

Live hard, die young:
A successor, Tejas, will appear in about a year. A family of chipsets code-named Grantsdale, coming later in the spring, will push the entertainment angle further by adding High Definition Audio and giving PCs the ability to act like a wireless access hub for other household devices.

"This is a fundamental leap forward in the platform capability. You are going to have better graphics, better audio," said Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of the Desktop Platforms Group at Intel. "If you compare it to the stack of CE (consumer electronics) stuff you are replacing, it is not only attractive in price, it is very attractive."

Manufacturing advances will also mean that processors on the Prescott design will proliferate more quickly across the price spectrum of computers than many predecessors, thereby putting pressure on Advanced Micro Devices.

Despite the advances, Prescott is not likely to address two of the hurdles facing Intel: power consumption and 64-bit computing. The chip, Intel's first on the 90-nanometre process, will consume 90 watts to 100 watts, and about 40 watts while idle due to leakage and inadvertent power consumption, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. Some notebook chips use less than 40 watts maximum.

Power consumption can put a ceiling on increasing performance over time. Typically, power consumption should decline as chips shrink in size.

"The shrink is not giving them any benefit at comparable frequencies," Brookwood said. "The thermals on Prescott are a bit higher than anyone anticipated."

Instead, these two issues may be handled in Tejas, a redesigned desktop chip slated for mass manufacturing at the end of the year, in an unusually rapid transition even if the inevitable delays are included.

Prescott's purpose
Although processor speeds have steadily advanced in the past several years, many of the data paths inside computers lurch forward only occasionally and consequently throttle performance. Prescott and the coming complimentary chipsets like Grantsdale will change that.

PCI Express, for example, will replace the Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) for connecting the processor to the graphics chip. It will later replace the PCI bridge, which connects the processor to peripherals such as cameras. PCI Express has a maximum bandwidth of 8 gigabytes per second. AGP 8X tops out at 2.1 gigabytes per second, and the PCI used in desktops generally peaks at 266 megabytes.

Depending on the computer's configuration, PCI Express will replace both AGP and PCI, one of them, or neither, but largely become the standard over time for both ports.

The design and style of PCs will also change as a result. PCI X requires that all data travels in a parallel fashion; a demand that forces engineers to create serpentine connections between different electrical connectors (called pins) on a circuit board so that the pins are electrically equidistant. In PCI Express, parallel delivery disappears. Data travels down a space-saving cable, which in turn allows for smaller boards and PCs.

Serial ATA, a similar connection for hard drives that's already out, will also become far more common in 2004 as Prescott and Grantsdale derivatives spread.

"If it looks like a PC, it won't end up in the living room," Mark Vena, director of Dimension products at Dell, said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. "In the next 12 to 24 months, there will be a dramatic shift in design.

While standard desktops will sport these technologies, the E PC -- a computer that resembles a set-top box -- will highlight these changes. The E PC is a full-fledged Prescott/Windows XP machine that sits on a TV and serves up music, recorded TV programmes, photos and other media files, Intel president Paul Otellini said at CES. Rather than a keyboard, it is operated with a remote.

Gateway and others have licensed the design from Intel and will come out with machines starting around $799 (£439) toward the middle of the year.

Intel has also worked to reduce the noise in these systems by designing new impellers -- the blades on fans -- and reorganising the way parts are placed inside the PC chassis to improve air flow, Burns said.

Other chipset changes include DDR 2 memory, which delivers data at a higher rate than current 400MHz DDR memory, and High Definition Audio. Some Grantsdale chipsets will come with an enhanced integrated graphics chip that will rival much of the technology on the market, Burns said.

"We have an unusual number of interfaces changing," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "In terms of overall platform there are clearly a lot more dynamics on the interfaces than the processor... Typically, you change one, maybe two things."

Technically speaking, the changes to the actual processor are less dramatic. Besides the 13 new instructions, the chip will sport an improved version of HyperThreading, which lets a processor run two tasks simultaneously. Taken together, these features could make it easier to decompress video or run virus scans in the background.