Intel to Offer Some Pieces in a Puzzle "In a four-page press release, Intel goes to great lengths to compare the new Itanium chip with both its previous Itanium, known as McKinley, and to a competing chip from Sun Microsystems. Missing in the document, though, is any reference to Intel's own industry-leading Pentium family of microprocessors. ... The missing comparison is intriguing because recent versions of the Pentium have demonstrated sharp performance increases of their own. ... Two weeks ago, Jack Dongarra, an independent analyst at the University of Tennessee, who tracks the performance of computers, released data showing that the most recent Pentium 4, which runs at 2.5 gigahertz, is now the fastest processor, under a standard measure of performance known as the Linpack Benchmark. It surpassed processors from companies like NEC, Cray, I.B.M. and Fujitsu that cost many times as much."