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

To: Amy J who wrote (96832)	1/20/2000 5:25:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Amy -< "mountain which labored over a mole hill". > The phrase was first coined 40 years ago. I found it in an article on the history of computer architecture. In the 50's IBM, Univac and others were busy designing and selling the first computers. However Burroughs was busy designing a very elegant machine with Virtual Memory, Multiple Processing ( concepts which were incorporated by the others in 70's), and finally introduced their first computer with fanfare in 1960. Despite the architectural innovations, its performance was not overpowering. Noting the long and immense development effort which went into the machine, an industry expert quipped "Burroughs is a mountain which labored over a mole hill". Hearing the Transmeta announcement, I was struck by the similarities of the situation. One innovation on the Transmeta chips is the adjustment of clock speed with the processor workload in order to extend battery life. This idea can easily be implemented on the x86 by a minor tweak to the Speed Stop technology. The operating system or some other utility can easily track the amount of CPU idle time, and adjust the CPU clock accordingly via Speed Stop. The frequency on tasks which are not CPU intensive ( word processing) could be taken down to 100-200MHz, dramatically reducing the power.We should not be surprised to see this on the market during the next year, and this will reduce the power dissipation advantage enjoyed by Transmeta.