Paul and All - it is great - <font color=red>Fast, Big and Fussy
any comments on "Fast, Big and Fussy .... running 2GHz at room temperature - for
a few seconds" and "an extremely high level of sensitivity to thermal considerations."
Regards
-Albert
09:25am EDT 24-Aug-00 Needham & Co. (Dan K. Scovel 212-705-0322) INTC INTC.GWI
FIRST CUT FROM IDF: XSCALE MICROARCHITECTURE, PENTIUM 4, AND ITANIUM
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Summary
* The Intel Developers Forum (IDF) conference is being held in San Jose, CA this
week.
* We are very impressed with the XScale microarchitecture for wireless
applications announced yesterday.
* We consider the upcoming Pentium 4 microprocessor offering to be fast, big and
fussy.
* We believe the software and infrastructure overhead for the upcoming 64-bit
Itanium microprocessor for server applications will be very significant.
* Intel's DSP product joint development effort with partner Analog Devices
continues.
* We are not changing our investment recommendation or earnings or revenue
estimates at this time based on the above preliminary observations of upcoming
new products.
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Fast, Big and Fussy Pentium 4
The next generation, high-performance PC microprocessor, the Pentium 4 (formerly
Willamette), will be introduced 4Q00. While details are extensive, this
product is nearly pass" for the crowd at IDF. The part looks to be fast, big
and fussy, in our opinion.
Performance enhancements are coming from NetBurst features that include:
tripling the system bus to 400MHz from 133MHz; doubling the instruction pipeline
stages to 20; double-clocking the internal ALU execution engines; and adding
instructions to optimize performance for graphics and e-commerce encryption
applications. We consider its performance striking. Management has carefully
sensitized presenters to position the offering to be introduced at over 1.4GHz.
However, we believe it is likely to emerge at 1.5GHz based on comments by less
politically sensitive presenters dealing with finer levels of architectural
details. Tuesday's Keynote presentation demonstrated a part running 2GHz at
room temperature-for a few seconds, anyway.
The large size is coming from 42 million transistors at 0.18-micron process
technology which is approximately twice that of the Pentium III. The current
Pentium III is approximately 100 square mils, so the incremental transistor
count implies a Pentium 4 die size in the neighborhood of 200 square mils.
Assuming this estimate is correct, we believe the cost structure is not well
aligned for high volume production. However, we also expect it to be promptly
redesigned in 0.13 micron-before it ramps to high volume production, with any
luck.
The part also appears to be quite fussy, probably due primarily to its
ultra-high performance. Intel is strongly encouraging software code
optimization, a long laundry list of motherboard layout recommendations, and is
promoting an extremely high level of sensitivity to thermal considerations.
Basically, the part is a major power hog that runs real hot. Clock cycles run
so fast that wire trace lines on motherboards are specified to absolute lengths
within six inches and relative lengths within 2 mils, in some cases. A
one-pound heat sink is recommended on the Pentium 4 chip itself to assist in
system power dissipation. Frankly, we consider such motherboard design specs as
onerous, and believe many PC makers are going the think long and hard before
trying to tackle such a design project. It seems a heck of a lot easier to buy
a working board from a vendor who has already jumped these hoops-especially if
the vendor is Intel.
Itanium Needs Ample Infrastructure
The new 64-bit Itanium (formerly Merced) is also expected to be introduced 4Q00.
It is a highly parallel microprocessor engine specifically designed for server
applications. However, it appears to have nothing in common with any of
Intel's current microprocessor offerings, in our opinion. The burden of feeding
instructions to the device that can be processed in parallel with one another
is the responsibility of the software writer. Close coupling of software and
hardware is another way to describe the situation.
As with the Pentium 4, we consider the expected performance to be impressive.
However, in this case we consider the software overhead to be excessive. This
also explains why the company has taken such great pains to build an
infrastructure with partners in the marketplace to support this offering: it
requires a lot of support.
We consider the potential success of the Itanium product offering too early to
call. In fact, we believe it will take at least a couple of years before it
would even be fair to evaluate its progress, given the extensive infrastructure
required to support it.
Joint DSP Development Continues
Intel and Analog Devices initiated a DSP product joint development program
several months ago, and we have heard no official word of status or intention
from either company for some time. However, Intel did mention the project in
passing during a morning keynote presentation yesterday and we did get a chance
to speak with some folks working on the project.
We understand work continues, people continue to be added, a new building is
being erected to house the operation and an announcement is planned for sometime
in the not too distant future. We guess this to be within the calendar year
and believe the products will not compete with Analog Devices' existing DSP
offerings. We also believe it will specifically not encroach on the wireless
space as defined for the just-announced XScale microarchitecture mentioned
above-Intel management made it very clear (more than it should have, in our
opinion) the new XScale offering is not intended to be compared to potential DSP
alternatives, in response to an audience question.
We view DSP as a very hot product category that offers Intel significant
potential future growth. However, we have no basis for which to scale the
opportunity or gage its probability of success at the current time.
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