New Prescott Pentium 4 processors on tap from Intel

Intel Corp. is planning to introduce over the coming months eight new Pentium 4 processors utilizing a new packaging technique, including its first workstation processors with 64-bit extensions technology, according to a document posted on Intel's Web site. The forthcoming chips were revealed within a Product Change Notification (PCN) document posted to Intel's Web site that contained details about power management and security enhancements planned for the Pentium 4. Hardware enthusiast Web side XbitLabs.com first reported on the document. Intel regularly distributes PCNs to hardware developers and customers to inform them of upcoming changes to existing products or plans to discontinue older products. Five of the eight new chips will launch alongside the Grantsdale and Alderwood chip sets on June 21, an Intel spokesman confirmed. Grantsdale and Alderwood are new chipsets that come with support for the PCI Express interconnect technology and DDR2 (double data rate) memory. Those five Pentium 4 chips will be introduced at clock speeds ranging from 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz. They will be labeled with Intel's new processor numbering system, starting with a 520 label for the 2.8GHz chip and scaling up to a 560 label for the 3.6GHz chip, according to the PCN. Later in the third quarter, Intel will introduce the first Pentium 4-brand processors with 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set, according to the PCN. This technology allows both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to run simultaneously on a system with a 64-bit operating system.