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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: d e conway who wrote (51087)	2/26/1999 4:38:00 PM
From: RDM	Read Replies (2) of 1571559

Someday perhaps, but not extactly today! Is this what they call vaporware? Intel Fudges 1GHz Chip Demo;And, No, It Wasn't KryoTech Intel would like all the world to believe that it's got a garden variety chip that broke the 1GHz speed barrier. Actually what they've got is more like a Mr Wizard's experiment. For the last couple of years Intel's brand-name execs have been trotting around to various forums showing what its latest stuff could do when cooled by KryoTech's chiller technology. Andy Grove started the pilgrimage back at Agenda 97 showing the then-unannounced Deschutes run-ning at over 600MHz, a third better than it came out at. The exercise has been repeated several times, each time pushing up the clock - 700MHz, 800MHz - and each time it has completely slipped Intel's mind to mention KryoTech's name anywhere near the technical demonstration. Well, as it happens, Intel caught some flak on the Internet for this attribution oversight and so this time it buried a parenthetical admission down towards the end of the press release it put out lauding its 1GHz breakthrough that read: "(Note: This technology demonstration used special cooling techniques.)" We gather we are witnessing the subtle hand of their lawyers here. And this time the unnamed and undescribed cooling technique is Intel's own. Maybe it's because KryoTech offered Intel two different prices the last time it came shopping for proto-types: one if Intel mentioned KryoTech's name, another if it didn't. Intel apparently didn't have anything nice to say about that, went off in a huff and apparently decided to do its own thing. It's hard to tell what they came up with since they wouldn't show anybody what was behind the curtain. It's unlikely they came up with some exotic refrigeration technique but it's amazing what you can do with liquid nitrogen and a pump. The demo ran a PowerPoint presentation. Intel originally bought a handful of prototypes off of KryoTech and sent them down to their lab boys who developed a special tunable mother-board for the stuff. It ratcheted up one mega-hertz at a time. Intel cherry picked a really fast chip from among its latest crop. This time through Intel used a Pentium III for the 1GHz demo. In the KryoTech days - and the 1GHz demo looked the same - they then used to blast the sucker up, figure out where it crashed, ratch-et it back one megahertz and send it down to the next convenient industry confab to prove head-room and spread a little FUD. In this case it was the Intel Developer Forum in chi-chi Palm Springs where they talked about the demo being the "first time the gigahertz fre-quency has been achieved on a standard micro-processor." Think about the loss of pride if Alpha got there first. And Intel was all atwitter about it being on a 0.25-micron chip. Intel SVP Albert Yu reassured everyone that Intel would have a commercial 0.18-micron Pentium III chip doing 1GHz by the end of next year. We take it he was referring to the 32-bit Forster previously identified by Intel as starting at 1 gig (CSN No 269). n

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