Intel Ships 3GHz Pentium 4

The new chip, which actually has a clockspeed of 3.06GHz, will be priced at $637 in 1,000-unit quantities. Ahead of the new processor's launch, Intel cut the prices on some of its processor offerings: The 2.8GHz Pentium 4 dropped to $401 from $508, and the 2.66GHz processor with a 533MHz front side bus and 2.6GHz chip with a 400MHz front side bus were reduced to $305 from $401. All pricing is based on 1,000-unit quantities.

The move to ship the new, highest-performing desktop processor in Intel's lineup brings to fruition predictions by Intel President Paul Otellini more than a year ago that the company would reach the 3GHz milestone by the end of 2002.

Intel is touting its Hyper-Threading technology as a means by which application performance--when tailored to make use of the technology--can be speeded up. Applications that are optimized for Hyper-Threading will essentially see one CPU as two and work faster as a result, Intel says.

While the chip maker was raising the roof on the high end of its product set, it was also dropping prices on the lower end. Earlier this week, Intel cut prices on its Celeron line by as much as 27 percent.