I guess there are already many more powerful processors used for specialist applications, but whats next from Intel (and others as well, I suppose) for the consumer?

Is the Pentium V in the pipeline? If so, when will it become popular? I guess the main reason I am asking is that I may upgrade mobo and processor at some point in the not too distant future, and if the Pentium IV is superceeded, it will probably drop in price substantially (and..... I am actually interested).

Thanks

AMD Athlon 64

Part Two

By "consumer" I take it you mean "runs Windows"? So that would rule out Mac's 64 bit G5, which is the stripped down consumer version of the IBM power4 (a fave of mine since I worked on the design team).

From Intel, there are "new" Pentium4's (roughly 2.8 ghz and up) with hyperthreading, and
the 64 bit Itanium's which will eventually get to the consumer market. There is no Windows for Itanium yet, so you would be stuck with Linux if you buy one now.

AMD has 64 bit processors and just announced a version slated for laptops. Theirs is more compatible with old 32 bit programs than itanium, so it can run windows now.

Pentium V? Not in this year. In this year will be released Pentium IV Prescott.
More details about this processor:
- Socket T
- 0.09u
- SSE 3
- Hyperthreading
- L1 cache: 16+24kb
- L2 cache: 1024kb
- up to 4ghz clock

There will be also new chipsets for this processor (i9xx series), supporting DDR2 memory.

"Instead of Tejas, Intel will kick-off 4.20GHz Pentium 4 Prescott chip in Q1 2005, the source indicated." http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040121103651.html

side note: The adverts on HA actually correspond to the topic - I get a load about cheap Pentium's when I view this page. Now, if they realised I was in the UK, I would be well chuffed

all I see for both the Opera and HA ads are "Ad blocked by KPF" - hell of a firewall for a free app.
Not planning personally on buying a Pentium anytime soon, my only Pentium (aside from a Gateway 2000 PIII 650) is a relatively slow P4 1.5 Ghz that I built in a brief moment of frustation.

Intel also have an X86-64 chip in the pipeline called Yamhill. While Intel won't publicy confirm this is the case, this is rumourded to be the Pentium V. Take a look at The Inquirer.

This little article explains what is coming in Intel consumer hardware in the short term:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1948

"Prescott" will be out for Socket478, but it won't scale all that high (the anandtech article mdmuir linked shows only a 3.4GHz model) before migrating to socket-t because of the insane amperage requirements and the inability of current motherboards to supply such amounts of current.
Note that on a per clock basis, many tasks may be slightly slower on the "Prescott" than on "Northwood" due to a lengthened pipeline.
You can find some preliminary "benches" at this Taiwanese site. It appears that the L1 I-cache is still 12k microops, but the D-cache has doubled in size to 16K. Assuming the results are not lies.

"Prescott" is rumored also to feature 4-way SMT (Hyperthreading) which should improve efficiency. I sincerely hope the "Prescott" Celeron is substantially improved over the current, rather abysmal model.

I would personally probably buy an Athlon64 over any currently availible or rumored future PIV - the memory latencies are so low, the performance is so impressive and the additional gp registers have not even yet been exposed by current software. The dynamic clock throttling feature of the A64 is also extremely exciting for those of us who appreciate quiet computing.


Well now, that's very impressive The "G5" (PPC970) has been out for nearly as long as the Opteron, so it's not really upcoming Of course, you could say the same for the A64.
edit: added last paragraph

On only a slight tangent, did Intel go with Pentium II, III, IV... just to avoid the name "sexium", or did someone beat them to the registry office with that name?

Well they have Itanium.

But they were marching pretty regularly through '186, '286, '386, '486, then switched to a fiveish word because they couldn't trademark a number. They have stuck with the five word for over 10 years now by adding modifiers like "pro" (aka 686) then II through IV.

i dont see what would be wrong with sexium, for example a well known 3d app was selling its version 6 as 'the joy of six"