Latest intelligence on Intel Corp’s Pentium or P5 microprocessor picked up by our sister paper Unigram.X is that the chip is running at only two thirds of its promised speed, and needs both a heat sink and fan to dissipate the heat it is producing. Siemens AG is understood to be the most advanced at this stage in the deelopment of working parts. It has so far only managed to run a sample P5 at 40MHz – just two thirds of the 66MHz speed Intel intended – and cannot get the thing to work at a faster rate. We understand that even at 40MHz Pentium produces twice the heat called for in simulations and, embarrassingly for Intel, will require a heat sink and fan no matter what. People who know say that the physics involved will enable Pentium to be turned around, but that Intel may have to back off from a 66MHz specification to 50MHz if it is to meet its revised March 1993 delivery date. Internally, Intel is thought to be finding it much harder and certainly more costly to produce new iterations of its iAPX-86 series than it expected. Intel will be showing off a bunch of Pentium-based prototype systems at Comdex Fall next week during invitation-only, 10-minute theatre presentations. Intel still says it will be introduced in the first quarter of 1993, and claims the superscalar chip operates at over 100MHz.
