Intel's i740 in performance lead...
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Intel Graphics Chip Leads The Pack
(02/12/98; 11:33 a.m. EST)
By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News
Ending months of speculation, Intel has entered the
graphics market by racing straight to the head of the
pack.
The company's new chip, the i740 2D/3D/video
graphics processor, is scheduled to be unveiled
Thursday. According to Intel customer STB Systems,
the chip generates a 3-D AGP benchmarking score
higher than any of its competitors -- a performance
verified by independent industry analysts.
"For a first-time entry, Intel's part is very good," said
Andy Fischer, analyst for Jon Peddie Associates
(JPA), in Tiburon, Calif., who characterized it as "a
wake-up call to the industry."
But Intel's lightning charge won't necessarily succeed
in shouldering aside rival graphics chip makers,
Fischer said. "Competitors will still generate design
wins with their AGP parts, and at much lower prices,"
he said. Still, even those competitors acknowledged
Intel's challenge as a formidable one.
"Intel is very well-positioned to take a major portion
of the market," said Jay Eisenlohr, vice president of
corporate marketing with Rendition, in Sunnyvale,
Calif.
Intel's entry is being backed by five add-on card
manufacturers, all of whom have pledged to support
the i740: Taiwan's ASUStek, plus Diamond
Multimedia, STB, Number Nine, and Real3D.
Much as it did in presenting its AGP specification,
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel characterized the i740
as an important component in its visual computing
initiative. The i740 is fully 2X AGP-compliant, loading
textures directly from a PC's main memory.
"This is a graphics controller for mainstream markets,
and it adds value to the Pentium II platform," said
Robert M. Gregory, director of graphics marketing for
Intel's Platform Components Division, in Folsom,
Calif. The i740 "is not intended to compete in all
segments of the market," he said. The chip is intended
to be the "leading performance chip in the mainstream
performance segment."
And that's where Intel's market impact becomes
confusing, analysts said. In the increasingly crowded
world of graphics accelerators, addressing the
"mainstream performance segment" means the i740 is
designed to accelerate Microsoft's Direct3D and
Silicon Graphics' OpenGL APIs, Gregory said.
That performance was in question last year, when Intel
sandbagged industry watchers by displaying a slower,
0.6-micron version of the i740.
The new 0.35-micron production version now
includes 3.3 million transistors inside a whopping
450-square-millimeter die, Intel executives said. At
peak output, the chip consumes 5.7 watts at 66 MHz.
Intel is expected to move to 0.25 micron when its
next-generation graphics chip, code-named Portola,
ships in 1999.
From a raw performance standpoint, analysts said
Intel's chief competition won't come from S3, as once
thought, but from 3Dfx Interactive, Nvidia, and
Rendition -- none of which play by the same rules.
In documents filed in its public offering, for example,
3Dfx characterized the use of its own API, Glide, as a
competitive advantage. Although Intel licensed an
early version of Glide, it decided not to accelerate
Glide in favor of Direct3D, said Brian Ekiss, Intel's
graphics marketing manager. At least 47 shipping PC
games are written specifically for 3Dfx's hardware
alone, according to the company.
"We're focused in a separate segment of the market
from Intel, specifically on games," said Andy Keane,
vice president of marketing at 3Dfx, in San Jose, Calif.
"The graphics market has become divided between
[Direct3D] compatibility and entertainment."
Rendition also uses a proprietary API, RRedline. Both
Rendition and 3Dfx's products also accelerate
Direct3D.
In addition, the chips don't accelerate all the same
functions. The Voodoo Graphics chip set from 3Dfx is
merely a 3-D-only controller. Rendition's V2200 and
NVidia's Riva 128 are 2-D/3-D/video controllers.
By contrast, Intel's i740 is designed to accelerate 2-D
and 3-D graphics, video, and even software
decompression of MPEG-2/AC-3 data on DVDs.
The chip is designed to output its information to
televisions via a Brooktree decoder, or interface
gluelessly to a low-cost DVD decoder from C-Cube
Microsystems.
The i740 processes 1.1 million Gouraud-shaded
polygons and 45 million to 55 million pixels per
second, at peak performance. On average, from
425,000 to 500,000 polygons and 45 million to 55
million pixels are processed, using 140 pixels per
triangle with many features enabled.
In Intel's parallel data-processing architecture, pixels
are processed in parallel, 15 at a time. Graphics
features such as mip mapping, color alpha blending,
fog, bilinear filtering, specular lighting, edge
anti-aliasing, and z-buffering are applied on a per-pixel
basis.
Many of those same graphics features are echoed in
competitors' chips, analysts said. The question, they
said, is if Intel can do it at a lower cost.
According to Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
"performance-class" graphics chip prices have
dropped from $25 to $30 to lower than $20 in
volume. The i740 is sampling at $29.75 in volumes of
10,000, and will enter production in March.
"I'm just not sure the Intel name is going to command a
premium," JPA's Fischer said.
Two things are certain, analysts concluded: The
frenzied competition in the graphics market means
Intel neither enjoys the same relative advantage as it
does in microprocessors, nor the same margins.
"In the grand scheme of things, Intel's presence in the
graphics market means almost nothing," perhaps
$0.02 to $0.06 per share, said Scott Randall, analyst
with SoundView Financial Group, in Stamford, Conn.
But Intel's graphics chip adds a new revenue stream at
the same time it makes it tougher for competitors like
Advanced Micro Devices to compete, he added.
Competitors and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
have raised concerns that Intel would leverage its
might in microprocessors and core logic chip sets to
gain an unfair advantage in the graphics arena.
Intel executives reiterated that they may integrate the
graphics chip into its core logic. "We will not rule out
integration if it makes sense to our customers,"
Gregory said.
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