Just wanted to see what the folks here had to say:

Intel Cancels Work On Its Next Chip For Desktops
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 7, 2004; Page B4
Intel Corp. is canceling work on its next chip for desktop computers, the latest sign of technical difficulties at the semiconductor company.People familiar with the situation said that the company will announce Friday that it is scrapping Tejas, Intel's code name for a forthcoming microprocessor, because of problems that are believed to include the chip's power consumption. Tejas was expected to be introduced in late 2004 or early 2005 and succeed Prescott, another internal name for a version of the Pentium 4 chip introduced in February. Engineers working on the Tejas design will be shifted to other chip projects, these people said.Intel declined comment.The Santa Clara, Calif., company has been grappling with a transition to a new manufacturing process that reduces lines of circuitry from 130 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, to 90 nanometers. Prescott, the first chip to use that process, has been saddled with unusually high power consumption, an issue that could also affect Tejas.The most-powerful version of Prescott consumes 103 watts, compared with 89 watts for earlier Pentium 4 models. Higher wattage requires computer makers to add extra fans or take other steps to cool chips.Dothan, the first chip for laptop computers that uses the 90-nanometer process, was delayed several months because of problems that caused high defect rates. But Dothan, and a predecessor chip dubbed Banias that was introduced last year, use power more efficiently than Prescott. Dothan will be formally introduced Monday, joining the Pentium M family that was begun with Banias.Intel is believed to be considering desktop chips that borrow from the Pentium M technology. But one person familiar with the matter said the company may focus on efforts to make chips faster by putting the equivalent of two microprocessors on a single piece of silicon.

For El Reg's take on this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/07/intel_cancels_tejas/

That makes it sounds like Intel noticed that the supposed mobile version was both cooler and faster, and that they killed the desktop project because it fulfilled no purpose.

This is what happens when marketing decisions drive engineering. Engineering is about balancing tradeoffs and Intel threw everything out the window to get higher clock speeds with the P4 architecture. It allowed them to win the mhz war but the performance doesn't justify the power consumption. And the P4 is just terrible with tasks like code compilation.

The Pentium M folded a modern memory bus, SSE2 and other improvements into the P3 architecture with excellent results. From an engineering perspective, it appears to be the better development path.

Ironically, Intel is now going to use product names instead of clock speeds to delineate the products in the new Pentium M line.

They still need to use numbers. But they could base the numbers on something other than clock speed. Call the first, slowest one the Ticonderoga 1.0. As long as they have the same architecture, faster ones should be faster, period, and definably so. So call the faster ones Ticonderoga 1.2, 2.6, etc., to define how fat they are in relation to each other. If and when they come up with a new architecture that no longer has a linear speed relationship with Ticonderoga, then give it a new name and start the numbering over. We're not usually given much choice as to which model to buy anyway. But we need to know which ones are faster without restoring to a chart.

I say all that as if you're part of Intel's marketing strategy. I just hate it when a range of products exists for the purpose of one specific definable trait and that trait's identity is hidden by marketing.