NEC's engineers had to rethink the problem completely, and their answer turned out to look quite a bit different from anything they originally expected. It also allowed a bit of headroom in the matter of heat transfer. According to Gregg Hamlin, the project manager at NEC, the design doesn't stop at 600 MHz, but is expected to serve in the computers that NEC will build around a new gigahertz chip that Intel plans to introduce later this year. That chip is still to come, according to Intel. George Alfs, a spokesman at Intel's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters, said some computer manufacturers are already shipping desktop computers with gigahertz processors, but the Pentium 3 Xeon chip aimed at network servers has yet to be delivered with a billion hertz speed.
Network servers use chips that have large memory cache.
In late May, Intel introduced a large-cache chip that operates at 700 MHz. The chip is offered in two versions, one with 1 mega-byte and the other with 2 MB of memory. Modeling NEC's engineers were working on a tight deadline and, to accelerate development, they added computational fluid dynamics to their resources at hand. The engineers expected to create a conventional elliptical pin fin design to radiate heat away from the processor chip. They ended up with anything but.