Intel Has High Hopes for Pentium 4

Problem is, analysts say, there aren't many challenges for the microprocessor's extra horsepower yet - especially considering the expected sticker shock. At the Intel Developer's Forum that begins Tuesday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company will be touting the Pentium 4, trying to encourage software developers to write programs that exploit its ability to speed up graphics, speech and streaming video. Intel's new chip initially will run at 1.4 gigahertz, or 1.4 billion cycles per second. Most computers sold now run much slower - at 700 megahertz or less. A radical redesign of Intel's consumer-targeted processor line, the Pentium 4 squeezes 42 million transistors onto a single chip, up from 28 million transistors on the Pentium III. New `NetBurst" technology divides work into smaller sets of instructs, completing it faster. And the data channel to the computer's memory - called the system bus - will operate at 400 megahertz, allowing the transfer at speeds of 3.2 gigabytes of data per second.