Intels new Pentium 4 CPU is debuting today.

Intel’s next-generation desktop platform, based on the Intel® NetBurst™architecture and code-named Prescott, illustrates how Intel is extending Moore’s Law, overcoming challenges in process technology, circuitry, and microarchitecture design, to continue gains in performance, frequency scaling, and efficiency.

Prescott is slated to be one of the first high-volume chips to be made using Intel’s
90-nanometer process and incorporating Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology.

I found this excerpt on ZDNet detail some of the features included in this new chip. Click below.

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 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.

A family of chipset code-named Grantsdale, coming later in the spring, will push the entertainment angle further by adding High Definition Audio and give 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 won’t likely address two of the hurdles facing Intel: power consumption and 64-bit computing. The chip, Intel’s first on the 90-nanometer process, will consume close to 90 watts to 100 watts, and around 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, an unusually rapid transition even if the inevitable delays are included.