Introduction

Getting hold and posting Intel's secret roadmaps has a long tradition at Tom's Hardware, but I admit that it has been rather quiet in this area for several months now. Obviously Intel is not feeling too well right now and so they made even more efforts to keep those future projections as secret as they should be in Intel's opinion.

Finally we were able to get an actual version of this highly anticipated paper and were very surprised to see quite a few unexpected changes. After Kyle Bennett from Hard OCP posted a few roadmap slides last night I will follow up on this with the explanation and evaluation you are used to at Tom's Hardware Guide. Please don't forget to have a look at Kyle's peek at a future Pentium 4 motherboard with i850 chipset as well to round things up.

Intel Desktop Processors

I am sure that you are all aware that Intel is currently in a bit of a nasty situation. After the retraction of the Pentium III 1.13 GHz at the end of August, in which Tom's Hardware played a major role , Intel's fastest processor is currently still the Pentium III at 1 GHz. At the same time AMD's Athlon 1.1 GHz is available for more than a month already and the Athlon 1.2 GHz will be released very shortly. There's no denying that Intel is currently quite a bit behind AMD, as Athlon processors are clearly the performance leaders in the x86 market right now.