Intel is expected to announce a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 on Monday at $637 a pop, and it is believed that ATI will unveil its latest Pentium 4 chipsets on the same day. The new processor will support a 200MHz frontside bus quad-pumped for an effective 800MHz frequency. It will contain 512KB of on-die L2 cache and be produced using a 0.13 micron fabrication process.
Its price should put the new P4 well above the current top-of-the-range model, the 3GHz chip, which is priced at $437, according to Intel"s most recent price list. Prices for either chip and the rest of the P4 range are not expected to fall until October, just ahead of the launch of Prescott, Intel"s next generation of Pentium processor.
ATI is expected to announce its RS300, RS300VE and possibly the RS300M chipsets on 23 June. Officially, the company has said it will release P4 chipsets - branded as Radeon IGP - in the summer, but a Goldman Sachs analyst recently said he believed the products would be launched this month. Timing its own launch to coincide with the Intel announcement is an obvious move.