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From...
Chip makers to show future designs
October 12, 1998
Web posted at: 1:30 PM EDT
by James Niccolai
(IDG) -- Although Advanced Micro Devices and Intel will likely steal the limelight at the Microprocessor Forum next week, a handful of smaller chip makers will unveil new designs that they hope will earn them a piece of the microprocessor pie.
The three-day event in San Jose, California, provides a haven for chip techies to get lathered up over the latest in microprocessor architectures. But while the show is short on marketing and heavy on tech talk, it will offer a peek into the future of the PC chip world.
Newcomer Rise Technology will be among the hopefuls, pitching its Intel-compatible mP6 architecture into the ring. The mP6 is aimed at the low-end PC market and consumes little enough power that it can be used in notebooks as well as desktops, said Michael Slater, founder and editorial director of Microprocessor Report.
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Rise, a neighbor of Intel in Santa Clara, California, has already produced samples of its chips and is expected to say next week when it will deliver a finished product to manufacturers, Slater said.
Integrated Device Technologies is due to disclose a new core design for its WinChip, which also targets the low-end desktop market. The WinChip 3 is faster than 266 MHz, the top speed of IDT's current chips, though the new design is unlikely to reach production for a couple of years, Slater said.
National Semiconductor subsidiary Cyrix will describe its next-generation chip core, code-named Jalape–o, the follow-up to its Cayenne design due later this year. The Richardson, Texas-based firm will also disclose an expected completion date for Jalape–o.
The smaller chip makers cannot compete with Intel or AMD on performance, so to distinguish their products, they must price them very aggressively. But with Intel and AMD offering relatively fast processors for less than $100, that's no easy feat, Slater said.
"Fighting Intel for $80 offerings will be very hard, but if you can build a reasonable business selling $50 processors, I don't think Intel will argue with that," Slater said.
If PC buyers keep demanding cheaper and cheaper PCs, that will make it easier for the smaller players to find a market for their low-end goods, Slater said. A good number of desktop systems will sell for as little as $600 next year (without a monitor), he predicted. The larger that number is, the greater the chance the also-rans have of earning a crust, Slater said.
Heavyweights on the High End For the high-end PC market, meanwhile, 1999 will be all about AMD and Intel.
AMD next week will offer the first glimpse of the K7, its next-generation chip that is to be rolled out in the first half of 1999. The K7's clock speeds will be 500 MHz and 550 MHz, according to AMD.
Intel will shed more light on Katmai New Instructions, a set of 70 processor instructions that Intel says will greatly improve the performance of applications that use audio, video, 3D rendering, and animation. The new technology, sometimes referred to as MMX2, will debut early next year in chips with speeds starting at about 500 MHz, Intel has said.