New Chips on the Horizon
winmag.com
THE PC ANGLE - by Jonathan Blackwood
New Chips on the Horizon
February 6, 2000
The past year wasn't an especially good one for Intel. The company had problems supplying its most popular chips in quantity, and had to recall several products it had rushed out the door that proved to be not yet ready for prime time. On top of that, it witnessed major defections in its roster of Intel-only PC manufacturers (Dell remains the only major US vendor not to use competitors' processors), and was forced to issue a profit warning in the last quarter as PC sales began to slow.
Don't write the company off just yet. Andy Grove's maxim "Only the paranoid survive" has never been more true, and has never been more taken to heart than it is these days by the chip giant. These days, it's not just AMD that's stealing Intel's market share; newcomer Transmeta has scored some major wins with its new, super-low-power Crusoe processors for notebooks and Internet-appliances, including use in new products from Gateway, Sony, Philips, Hitachi, NEC and Fujitsu.
Intel is responding in the mobile space first. Just this past week the company launched its 500MHz "Ultra-Low-Voltage" Mobile Pentium III with SpeedStep technology (it steps back to 300MHz when on battery power). This processor operates at less than one volt and draws one half watt of power at 300MHz. The company will boost the speed of this processor to 600MHz later this year. It's a direct response to Transmeta's Crusoe processor which is reputed to give five to six (or more) hours' use on a single battery charge.
Don't confuse this part with Intel's "Low-Voltage" 700MHz Pentium III expected to launch in February. In March, look for the rollout of 900MHz and 1GHz Mobile Pentium III processors with SpeedStep, along with 750MHz Mobile Celerons. These processors are not designated low power, but the "mobile" designation indicates they'll use less power than their desktop counterparts.
With Intel's next process shrink, from 0.18 microns to 0.13 microns, the "Ultra-Low-Voltage" chip is expected to hit 700MHz, possibly late this year. The 0.13-micron processors are code-named "Tualatin" (Intel likes to code-name its processors after Pacific Coast rivers), and will contain 512KB of full-speed, on-die, Level 2 cache in some versions, and 256KB in others. Not surprisingly, these are currently code-named Tualatin-512 and Tualatin-256.
One the desktop side, Intel is due to relaunch its 1.13GHz Pentium III processor this spring, about the time it retires its recently released 1.3GHz Pentium 4. That's probably because the 1.13GHz Pentium III is a bit faster than the 1.3GHz Pentium 4, and cheaper to produce. Other Pentium 4 processors will hit 1.7GHz later this year, with 2.0GHz sure to follow, perhaps before 2002, depending on competitive conditions.
One factor limiting the Pentium 4's acceptance, incidentally, is its exclusive use of expensive Rambus memory. Don't be surprised to see new chipsets for this processor supporting DDR (double-date-rate) SDRAM in the coming months. And naturally, ready-or-not, as the Pentium 4 ramps up, the Pentium III will begin to disappear.
I'll update AMD's expected roadmap for 2001 in a future column. |
