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Intel Tejas delayed until 2005

Prescott shuffles back too

Intel's 'Tejas' processor, the successor to the as-yet-unreleased 'Prescott', will now not be released until 2005 rather than late next year. However, the 130nm Northwood core Pentium 4 won't last as long as previously planned.

So claims Japanese site PC Watch on the back of recent Intel roadmaps it has seen.

The shift is a result of the 90nm Prescott being moved back from Q4 2003 to Q1 2004. Last August, Intel was saying 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz Prescotts would be shipping in volume in the current quarter. At least one of those parts will ship before the end of the year, enough for Intel to claim a revenue gain, but almost certainly not in the volumes the company originally had in mind.

Instead, we get the 130nm Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to cover the Prescott-shaped hole in the Q4 2003 segment of Intel's roadmap. The 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz Prescotts now appear in Q1 2004, alongside the 2.8GHz and 3GHz versions of the chip. The latter two had always been scheduled for a Q1 release. But if they have not been delayed, other top-clocked Prescotts have, with the 3.6GHz, 3.8GHz and 4GHz versions each falling back one quarter.

And as a result, the 775-pin Tejas - a lot of pins for a 32-bit chip, some say - gets pushed back a quarter, to Q1 2005. 775-pin Prescotts are expected in due course, supported by the Grantsdale PCI Express chipset, possibly in Q2 2004.

The Prescott-based Celeron series are still listed on their original schedule: 2.8GHz and 3GHz in Q2 2004, rising to 3.2GHz in the Q3 and higher in Q4.

Back in August, Intel's desktop roadmap saw 130nm Pentium 4 chips surviving well into Q4 2004, but the update suggests they will be phased out sooner, probably during Q3 next year, despite the Prescott delay. Presumably, Intel hopes that Prescott will now ramp up faster during 2004, thanks to the quarter's delay this year, allowing it to fill its desktop range with 90nm parts more quickly than it anticipated before. ®

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