You tell him,Paul!..................... Inside Intel's plans for the
future
By Steven Musil
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 26, 2000, 6:00 a.m. PT
Intel stole the spotlight this week, showing off new chips for cell phones and handheld
computers, talking strategy and predicting a rival's doom.
Intel released details on the Pentium 4 and showcased new chips for cell phones and handheld
computers. The Pentium 4 features a completely new architecture called "NetBurst" designed
to handle tasks--such as data encryption, video compression or Napster-like peer-to-peer
networking--that have grown in popularity with the Internet.
The upcoming Pentium 4 will be more than twice as big as the
Pentium III and approximately 28 percent bigger than anticipated,
an increase that will boost Intel's manufacturing cost and limit the
number of chips produced.
Most initial Itanium chips will run at 733 MHz, slower than the 800 MHz expected, but there are
a host of other high-end computer products to compensate for the disappointment. The chip's
speed is a lesser factor than architectural improvements such as the 64-bit design that allows it
to hold vast databases within memory. But the slower speed indicates difficulties with the
manufacturing process for the large new chip.
Intel will ratchet up the speed of its high-end Xeon chips to 1 GHz, which has more
psychological value than practical utility because of bottlenecks talking to memory and other
components in a computer. Xeons are used primarily in servers, the computers that are the
brains of computer networks.
Intel executives predict the peer-to-peer technology popularized by Napster could usher in the
next wave of the Internet and, in the process, save companies billions of dollars by using
computing power already in place.
The chip giant and others have invested $9 million in a start-up that will make chips for the
upcoming InfiniBand technology for high-speed connections among servers, storage systems
and networks.
Intel CEO Craig Barrett compared Sun
Microsystems to communism, saying the server
maker represents an increasingly outmoded way
of doing business because it locks corporate
customers into products or services from a single
seller. "If (Sun CEO) Scott McNealy's model
worked, communism would still be prevalent and
challenging capitalism." |
