Intel abandons the clock-speed race and drops its 4.0GHz Pentium processor

October 18, 2004. Intel has announced that it is to cease the development of its 4.0GHz Pentium processor. In July 2004, it announced that the 4.0GHz processor would not achieve its shipment dates for the end of the year, and put back the launch dated to the spring of 2005. But, for the time being, 3.8GHz is to remain the highest clock speed for the Pentium processor. Intel says that it will be transferring its engineers to work on the dual-core designs demonstrated at the recent Developer's Forum. The reason for this change in policy is probably because Intel and arch-rival AMD have been having increasingly difficult problems with producing reliable fabrications able to cope with the amount of heat generated by such high clock speeds. First AMD and now Intel have moved away from developing raw clock speed towards putting more than one processor on a single chip. Early indications show that the dual-core strategy boosts performance by up to 55 per cent.
The clock-speed contest may be at at an end, but, for marketing purposes, Intel still needs to show that its processors are constantly improving. Hence the adoption of a new way of naming them. For more information on this subject, read this earlier story:
Intel adopts a new and highly confusing numbering system for its processors
Intel has decided to use a new confusing numbering system for its processors instead of using just the name of the processor and its clock-speed in gigahertz (GHz).
"Intel Introduces Processor Numbers" -
http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/info.htm#p4htt
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"Pentium® 4 processors Optimization Tip - Driver Installation Order"
"Correct Driver installation is crucial to overall platform performance. This is especially true for the Intel® 850 and Intel® 845 chipsets. Drivers should always be installed in the order displayed in Table 1 below. The most critical step in the installation order is to run the Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility before all other drivers. Once the chipset is properly detected and configured using this utility, device driver installation order becomes less crucial and will have less impact on system performance." - From a page called Pentium® 4 processors Optimization Tip - Checking Driver Installation that no longer exists on Intel's site.
Visit Intel.com for any such information or Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility that you need for your particular motherboard's Intel chipset.