All,
Appears that IDT is way ahead of AMD and Cyrix in notebook pentium MMX's and maybe Intel?. And they have plans for a 233MHz not PR crap that cyrix is pushing.
Centaur starts providing samples of its Pentium-class chips
By Terho Uimonen
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 5:13 PM PT, Jun 5, 1997
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Centaur Technology officials demonstrated the IDT-C6 chip running in a notebook computer at the Computex show here Thursday, and said prospective customers have now received the first samples of this new low-cost Pentium-class processor family.
Officials from Advanced Micro Devices and Cyrix, two other Intel competitors, welcomed the addition of a new player in the x86 arena.
"The more, the merrier," said Everett Roach, Cyrix's Asia-Pacific vice president.
"There's room for all of us," added Robert Buck, country manager at AMD's Taiwan office.
Targeted mainly at notebooks and desktop PCs priced at less than $1,500, the IDT-C6 is Centaur's first x86 processor, and features MMX-compatible multimedia instructions, Centaur said.
Scheduled for introduction in September, the first versions will be priced from $100 to $150 and will run at clock speeds of 150, 180, and 200 MHz. A 233-MHz version is also in the pipeline, officials said .
And it was no coincidence that Taiwanese notebook manufacturers were chosen as the first customers to receive engineering samples of the chips, said Joe Baranowski, Centaur's vice president, sales and marketing.
"This is where the business is," Baranowski said. "We are focusing on the notebook market first." Taiwanese manufacturers are advanced and experienced enough to help Centaur evaluate the new chips, the first x86 processors the company has designed, he added.
The IDT-C6 is especially suited for notebooks because it consumes about 40 percent less power than comparable Intel offerings, Baranowski said.
A 200-MHz IDT-C6 dissipates only 10.6 watts, as compared to the 15.7 watts of an Intel Pentium MMX chip running at the same clock speed, Baranowski added.
Taiwan last year became the world's largest producer of notebooks, churning out 3.77 million portables, or about 32 percent of total supply, according to estimates from the government-sponsored Market Intelligence Center.
Integrated Device Technology, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based parent company of Centaur, will start volume production of the IDT-C6 chips in August, and expects to make 100,000 chips per month by March of next year, Baranowski said.
For the first six months, however, Centaur will only ship the chips to Taiwanese companies, Baranowski added.
The IDT-C6 processors will fit into the same Socket 7 architecture motherboards that also can house Intel's Pentium and Pentium MMX chips, AMD's K5 and K6, as well as Cyrix's 6x86 and the new MMX-enabled 6x86MX chips.
Integrated Device Technology Inc. can be reached at (408) 727-6116 or centtech.com.
Terho Uimonen is a Taipei correspondent for the IDG News Service, and InfoWorld affiliate.
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