San Francisco, June 23: Intel on Monday announced a faster Pentium 4 microprocessor with performance-enhancing hyper-threading technology, as the world's largest chipmaker rolls out ever-faster chips. Intel said that its latest, and fastest, Pentium 4 will run at 3.2 gigahertz, or 3.2 billion cycles per second. With the hyper-threading technology, a PC with that chip can convert one minute of digital video to the MPEG 4 standard while also converting 26 minutes worth of music to the MP3 format more than four times faster than a Pentium III chip running at 1 gigahertz, Intel said.

Intel now has desktop microprocessors, the brains of personal computers, running at 2.40 gigahertz to 3.2 gigahertz, and costing $163 to $637, the price of the latest Pentium 4. Intel's hyper-threading technology allows software written for it to "see" two processors instead of one. It was first included in server and workstations, but Santa Clara, California-based Intel has now brought the technology to its Pentium 4 chips. Bureau Report