New chip coming from Intel

I thought this was interesting, and maybe you will as well. In light of checking out things for a new pc I found this on sharkyextreme.

Intel
Today's Pentium 4 "Northwood" -- the desktop CPU built on an 0.13-micron process, incorporating a small Level 1 and 512K Level 2 cache -- is going to keep its job as Intel's flagship for almost another year, until the fourth quarter of 2003. That seems like a long time, but Intel is feeling flush since last month's triumphant introduction of the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading -- and will be working hard to push that enhanced-multitasking-performance, one-CPU-that-software-sees-as-two technology into the mainstream, adding it to new, more affordable Pentium 4 models with clock speeds from 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz.

Also, after marching in double-quick time from 2.2GHz to 3.06GHz last year, Intel will slow to a stroll in terms of raising Pentium 4 clock speeds -- look for a 3.2GHz chip in the second quarter of 2003, but maybe no more than 3.4GHz by year's end.

But the company is moving aggressively in terms of supporting faster memory: Having boosted the Pentium 4's front-side bus from 400MHz to 533MHz, Intel is now vaulting right over its originally planned next step of 667MHz and will introduce 800MHz (quad-pumped 200MHz) front-side bus Pentium 4s, tailor-made for dual-channel DDR400 memory, at a variety of clock speeds in Q2 2003. The old 400MHz-bus chips, already fading fast, will vanish, with The Inquirer reporting that Intel's estimates show the speedy 800MHz bus climbing from 20 percent of second-quarter CPU shipments to over 60 percent by the fourth quarter.

As for Prescott, the 0.09-micron (90-nanometer) heir to Northwood is now slated to debut in the fourth quarter of 2003, with a healthy 1MB of Level 2 cache and core speed of at least 3.2GHz (sports fans are still hoping for 4GHz). It, too, will ride an 800MHz bus.

I cannot imagine the capabilities this might have with running games like Doom 3.

yea i have heard of that, about 2 months ago. anyway i dont know, other companies are working on other technologies. will the P4 new versions be worth it? hope they also work on the price too. there is a shit load of new technology we will see in a few years, maybe even replacement of hard drives with something the size of a card, with no moving parts.

Sephiroth said:

maybe even replacement of hard drives with something the size of a card, with no moving parts.

My hard drive has no moving parts, I should send it off for repair really :)

Erm... a card with no moving parts... could it be a -- cartridge?

instead of doing that, make them faster and more reiable and smaller with more space.

Of course, there's a limit to how small a hard drive can be made physical size wise. Only so many bits can be packed into a small 2-dimensional space. All conventional magnetic and optical storage technologies will run out of gas eventually, and something new may need to be developed. The same goes for existing processor fabrication; transistors can only be so small. The next logical step, of course, is quantum computing.

Bloodshedder said:

The next logical step, of course, is quantum computing.

Not necessarily. Quantum computers can be excellent at tasks like searching and sorting, but they get nowhere near electronic processors in terms of speed (as in instructions per second) and they will never perform well with digital arithmetic operations. The concept of quantum computers is indeed very interesting, but they're at least 25 years off, and in the meanwhile we'll have to find other methods. My bet is on optical systems. IIRC some progress has been made recently with developing optical transistors.