Fred and ALL: Interesting article
Pentium Pro To Get Major Makeover
(01/12/97; 9:01 p.m. EST)
By Anthony Cataldo, Electronic Buyers News
San Mateo, Calif. -- Even as Intel tries to boost the flagging consumer PC market with its MMX technology, the company is quietly planning a fresh assault on the high-end market with a revamped Pentium Pro lineup.
Intel is also preparing a chip designed to process encryption keys as long as 128 bits. It could be introduced later this month.
Intel will also be facing renewed competition from Cyrix, which is preparing to unveil its Gx processor next month.
The new Intel processors will depend heavily on the company's successful conversion to 0.25-micron technology, which is scheduled to go on line in the second half of the year. Intel today uses 0.35-micron technology to build the bulk of its Pentium chips.
The first Pentium Pro chip to get a major makeover will be the Katmai, which is scheduled to come out in early 1998 and will likely run at 300 MHz. Like the first revision of the Pentium Pro, the Klamath pro- cessor, which will debut in the second quarter of 1997, the Katmai will be packaged on a daughtercard format but will include some improvements to the architecture.
"This redesign will enhance the architecture somewhat," said a source familiar with the company's plans. "Basically, Katmai is supposed to have bigger caches and an enhanced MMX instruction set."
Intel conceded last week that the current MMX instruction set will need to be altered in the Pentium Pro. Currently the processor takes two or more cycles to switch between MMX instructions and floating point, which hurts performance.
"A potential next step is to simultaneously perform floating-point and MMX instructions in parallel," said Denis Precheur, strategic marketing manager for Intel. "The question is how to do that."
Following Katmai, the company plans to introduce in the second half of 1998 another Pentium Pro derivative called the Willamette, which will include further improvements, such as more execution units.
The Willamette will be succeeded by the Merced chip, which is being developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard Co. and is expected to debut in late 1998 or early 1999.
Intel's plan is to eventually move away from the more expensive multichip module package used by the Pentium Pro, sources said.
Analysts agreed that the current packaging is costly.
"Throwing two chips into that package is an expensive proposition," said Mike Feibus, principal analyst at Mercury Research, Scottsdale, Ariz. "I'm not sure if Intel knew that in the beginning."
The Klamath, slated to debut next quarter, will be the first chip to break that mold, although it will take aim at the lower end of the 32-bit Windows NT market. By late 1997, Klamath will undergo a "shrink" to 0.25-micron, an iteration known as Deschutes. Deschutes, however, will not undergo any significant architectural changes, sources said.
Intel would not comment specifically on its plans for the Pentium Pro lineup. However, the company's executive vice president, Craig Barrett, said, "There are a whole sequence of chips under development that are follow-ons to the Pentium Pro."
Lower packaging costs coupled with the architectural changes are expected to help Intel expand its market share into high-end servers and workstations.
Analysts said Intel has made a major incursion into the low- and part of the mid-range workstation markets since the chip was introduced last January.
Pentium Pro sales through PC manufacturers Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM showed impressive growth in the fourth quarter, said Charles Boucher, senior semiconductor analyst with UBS Securities.
"I do think there's an encroachment on the historically Unix-based U.S. market by the NT and Pentium Pro combination," he said. A 200-MHz Pentium Pro-based system with a 3-D card costs $10,000, while a comparable system using Unix and a RISC architecture costs $20,000 to $30,000. "It's a compelling value proposition," Boucher said.
Meanwhile, Intel last week took the wraps off its long-awaited MMX processors, which the company hopes will give the home-PC market a jolt early in the year. The new architecture can significantly boost performance of multimedia-rich applications with hooks to MMX and enable new uses such as software-only modems, although there are now only about 10 software titles that take advantage of the technology. All other applications will get an automatic 10% to 20% performance improvement, mainly as a result of the doubled internal cache size.
Intel is providing 166-MHz and 200-MHz versions of the P55C chip for desktop systems, and low-voltage 150-MHz and 166-MHz versions for notebooks. Even though the company has been stuffing the channels with parts for the past several months, Intel still expects supplies to be limited, a situation reminiscent of the shortages during the third and fourth quarters of last year for its high-end processors.
"Initially it will be very tight," said Albert Yu, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's microprocessor products group, Santa Clara, Calif. "Our ability to ramp is going to be a limiting factor."
Consumer PC sales in the United States, which represent about 10% of the worldwide market, appear to have fared poorly compared with other segments such as business sales, and it's still questionable whether MMX can provide the magic bullet.
"We don't expect it to cause a huge change in the slope of the demand curve," UBS' Boucher said. "1997 is going to be driven by the corporate upgrade cycle."
They just keep rolling, and rolling, and rolling...
Regards, Michael |
