February 18, 1998
Intel Unveils New Chip Designed
For Sub-$1,000 Computer Market
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Intel Corp.'s top executive demonstrated the chip giant's
first chip designed specifically for personal computers that cost less than
$1,000, one of the hottest parts of the PC market.
Andrew S. Grove, chairman and chief executive officer of the Santa Clara,
Calif., company, showed off a consumer desktop computer using a chip with
the code name Covington. The chip, a variant of Intel's Pentium II design, will
be released in April and run at a speed of 266 megahertz, a relatively fast
speed for inexpensive computers.
Unlike the standard Pentium II, Covington has no secondary memory chip,
called a level-two cache. A single chip is less costly to package. Despite this
limitation, Mr. Grove showed that the Covington-based machine is powerful
enough to run multimedia applications with 3-D animations and video.
Mr. Grove, speaking at a conference in here for software developers, said the
chip will have a different brand name than the Pentium II, which he didn't
disclose.
Intel was later than some rivals in targeting designing new products for the
sub-$1,000 market. Mr. Grove said the company now has 650 engineers
working on such products, compared with none one year ago.
Later this year, Intel is expected to unveil a another low-cost Pentium II chip
called Mendocino, which integrates a separate cache chip into the
microprocessor itself. The Mendocino chip is expected to have much higher
performance than the Covington chip.
Rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. says it is preparing its own
products to lower the costs of computers. Dana Krelle, an AMD marketing
executive, said the Sunnyvale, Calif., company is well prepared to produce
chips that cost less than Intel's coming chips.
On the Nasdaq Stock Market Tuesday, Intel closed at $84.625, up 81.25
cents.
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