Hypterthreading: Intel's big idea for the desktop

Intel will bring the performance-enhancing server technology known as hyperthreading to the desktop later this year, the company's vice president Paul Otellini told delegates at the Intel Developer Forum yesterday.

Intel is hosting the event in San Jose, California.

"There's no doubt it gives us a competitive advantage, but it also gives us a market advantage" by expanding the capabilities of PCs, Otellini said in a briefing held before his keynote speech.

Hyperthreading will appear in the 3GHz Pentium 4 for desktops, due later in the quarter. The technology allows different elements of the chip, such as the integer unit for graphics processing and the floating-point unit for complex calculations, to be active at the same time.

By multitasking in this manner, chip performance can be boosted by 25 per cent to 30 per cent, Otellini said. It's a free performance boost, he added, because the circuitry to enable hyperthreading is already inside the Pentium 4.

Software applications must be tuned to take full advantage of hyperthreading, and some such programs - Adobe Photoshop and Windows Media Encoder 9, for example - are available or coming to market now. But even applications that aren't tuned, such as Microsoft Outlook, will see a partial boost because the technology will let the chip run two functions from Outlook at the same time, Otellini said. Windows XP and 2000 are already hyperthreaded, he added.

For speed freaks, Otellini also demonstrated a 4.5GHz Pentium 4 processor onstage. He was able to rev the chip to 4.7GHz before the machine konked out and offered up a blue screen.

As expected, Otellini also showed off computers from NEC running Madison, the codename of the next version of its Itanium processor, which is scheduled for release next year. Madison will outperform the current Itanium II by 30 per cent at launch, he promised.

"This chip is about a half a billion transistors," Otellini said. Itanium II contains around 220 million transistors, according to Intel. Hewlett Packard, which co-developed the Itanium architecture, is also heavily involved in creating Madison, he added.

Sales of Madison, while slightly lagging, should occur in greater volumes than Itanium II "by definition," Otellini said. So far, few Itanium II servers have shipped to the marketplace.

Michael Kanellos writes for News.com