This is the only news I've seen so far....
Linda
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INTC : INTEL CORP (NASDAQ) All Headlines
Chip giants preparing for war in server market
By Therese Poletti
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct 5 (Reuters) - U.S. chip makers are preparing to battle it out in the fast-growing market for computer servers, with a host of faster, more sophisticated chips in development.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) and its rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) set the stage for a new battle, by revealing technical details of new chips on Tuesday, as they both plan to target the high-end workstation and server markets, but with vastly different offerings.
At the Microprocessor Forum, a conference for engineers and computer designers, Intel revealed a few more technical details of its newly-named Itanium processor (previously known as Merced), its first chip designed using a new architecture for 64-bit computing. In 64-bit computing, data is processed in chunks of 64 bits, compared with 32-bit chunks today.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., announced its plans for a 64-bit chip, but it plans to base its chip, code-named Sledgehammer (previously known as K8) on a new instruction set, called x86-64. AMD, which typically clones Intel's processors, said it is extending its current 32-bit architecture so that the new 64-processor will run all software applications. But the chip will not be a clone of Intel's future 64-bit family.
"The vast majority of applications will not be 64 bit," Fred Weber, vice president of engineering, at AMD, told the conference. "Even the highest performance applications will stay 32 bit."
Chip giant Intel does not agree. It is targeting the high performance server space with the Itanium and its follow-on chips, calling them engines for Internet servers, which must be able to constantly add new users. The company also recently opened its first in a series of major data centers, where it plans to host Web servers for companies who need hosting services for their electronic commerce sites.
"If you want to have something that has head room for twenty years, you can't start with something (a technology) that is 20 years old," Ron Curry, director of marketing of Intel's IA-64 processing division, told reporters at a briefing.
Analysts said that they believe AMD is hurting right now from the recent departure of some of its key engineers. Jim Keller, who was a co-architect of the K8 or Sledgehammer design, has left the company. Keller's departure came shortly after Greg Favor, another major architect and an AMD fellow, who left for a chip start-up company called Siara.
"Bottom line, it's a question of not having any design talent," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst with US Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "They had to put out a roadmap, even if it's just paper."
Intel's Itanium processor, which is due in volume in the second half of 2000, is the farthest along of any of the other processors that were discussed in the server session of the conference. But some attendees were dismayed by the lack of details to come from the company, which still hasn't disclosed details such as Itanium's size, clock speed, or its power consumption.
Intel did disclose that the Itanium has a floating point performance of six gigaflops, or 6 billion operations per second, details on the parallelism in the chip, which is developed to run with other processors and other more technical points.
"We are disclosing more about this product than with any other," Curry said.
Attendees and analysts said they were very impressed with a new chip from International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), called Power4. As previously reported, the IBM chip is a copper chip, targeted for use in IBM's AS/400 minicomputer and RS/6000 workstation families, in the second half of 2001.
The IBM chip design has seven layers of copper, 170 million transistors and will surpass a speed of one gigahertz, said Jim Kahle, the chief architect of the Power4.
"This is a server part to end all server parts," said Keith Diefendorff, editor-in-chief, of the Microprocessor Report, which sponsors the conference.
IBM said it believes the performance in its chip will be on equal footing with McKinley, the code name for Intel's next 64-bit chip which will follow the Itanium. Since Itanium had some slippages, it is too soon to tell when the McKinley chip will come out.
"We set our sights on McKinley a long time ago," said Vijay Lund, a vice president of server technology development at IBM. "It's unfortunate that Merced (Itanium) slipped. We stayed on track."
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