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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon Hodgson who wrote (87263)	8/26/1999 4:54:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Gordon and Intel investors, pretty good article on Timna. Article points out that it might be aimed at the "medium" performance market, including for business PCs. This statement is interesting: Industry sources say the recent acquisition of Dialogic by Intel, coupled with increasingly proprietary interfaces in its chip designs, are a further indication of Intel's plans. Is Intel going to a strategy of keeping the competition more out in the cold with proprietary interfaces? zdnet.com August 24, 1999, 9:29 AM EST How Unique Is Your PC? Intel is about to make it even harder to differentiate hardware. By Chris DeVoney & Ed Sperling, Sm@rt Reseller Take the covers off any PC by late next year or early 2001, and you'll likely find even fewer differences among multiple systems than you see today. The reason: Intel is developing a single silicon chip that will contain the usual central processing unit plus all of the essential controllers and interfaces for a PC. Code-named Timna, this 32-bit PC-on-a-chip would significantly reduce system costs, which will be vital if Intel is to wage war against thin clients and WebTV. Timna would combine the processing functionality of a future IA-32 Pentium III processor and the capabilities offered by processor support chip sets like the Intel 810 or 820, sources say. The support chips' functionality is divided into two areas. "Northbridge" refers to graphics, audio and memory, and would be the equivalent of combining an audio/modem DSP, a video graphics controller, and memory controller onto the chip. "Southbridge" includes I/O interfaces and would include items like the PCI bus, USB bus and Ethernet networking controllers. The chip would banish legacy devices such as the standard serial, parallel and keyboard ports, and the ISA bus. Industry sources say the recent acquisition of Dialogic by Intel, coupled with increasingly proprietary interfaces in its chip designs, are a further indication of Intel's plans. Most PC-on-a-chip efforts from rivals are aimed at the low-end consumer market, stressing value over performance. Timna, which is aimed at the mid-market, stresses performance over price. Consumers and manufacturers would be the primary beneficiaries of such a move. Although OEMs still must add system memory and peripherals to such a box, the selling price of a business PC would drop from the $1,400 to the $700 range, and consumer PCs would drop from sub-$700 to the sub-$300 range. An Intel spokesman declined to comment about Timna. Rob Enderly, an analyst at Giga Information Group, sees Timna as "a natural extension" of Intel's processor plans and how "manufacturing is moving toward an industrial design." Enderly believes the chip will drop the price of a mainstream PC to below the $750 mark, enabling "people [to] get their margins back." However, all channels still would suffer the effects of price erosion on office desktops. Enderly also sees Timna as a "effective barrier" to thin clients and WebTV. Most manufacturers we contacted refused to comment about Timna, future product plans or the possibility that Timna would further blur distinctions among manufacturers. Still, a Compaq spokesman says most PCs today have similar foundations but differences in basics, such as DVD-ROM, which give manufacturers room to differentiate their products.