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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (98374)	2/7/2000 3:10:00 AM
From: Sam Bose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel to announce world's first Gigahertz Chips today... February 7, 2000 New Era Approaches: Gigahertz Chips By LAWRENCE M. FISHER, The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO -- To a gigahertz and beyond. That could be the thematic call to action at the International Solid State Circuits Conference opening here on Monday. As microprocessor manufacturers and semiconductor engineers gather to swap technical papers and discuss the esoterics of circuit design, the once unthinkable milestone of a chip that cycles a billion times a second -- a gigahertz -- is about to be passed. Both Intel Corp. and IBM will present papers describing complete microprocessors that operate at one gigahertz speeds, and both say they will introduce production chips with that capability in the second half of the year. But as important as the gigahertz barrier is as a symbolic milestone, it will probably be surpassed as rapidly as the 100 megahertz level -- a tenth as fast -- was exceeded and improved upon a few years ago. Though computers operating at 100 megahertz are perfectly adequate for running word processors or spreadsheets, the demands of the Internet and electronic commerce ensure a voracious market for all the speed and performance the chip makers can deliver. The first big market for gigahertz processors will likely be Web servers. Beyond serving up Web pages or processing electronic orders more expeditiously, a microprocessor that runs at a billion cycles a second -- or faster -- will make possible applications not feasible with today's fastest chips. Manufacturers say they believe truly interactive voice recognition and video will be big drivers of microprocessor performance, but they also acknowledge that the biggest markets may come from applications not yet imagined. Not so long ago, experts predicted that chip performance would reach the limits of Moore's Law long before reaching a gigahertz. Moore's Law refers to the observation by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that the number of devices on a chip doubles every 18 months, a rough indication of similar gains in performance. Because this doubling requires ever-smaller circuits, it was thought the limits of physics would create a dead end. That has turned out not to be the case so far. "The message here is a simple one," said Randall D. Isaac, a vice president at IBM Research. "The gigahertz era has arrived, and it looks like we have room to move up to the 3 or 4 gigahertz range very rapidly. Everyone talked about these limits, the end of Moore's Law, everything was going to slow down. But everything seems to be speeding up," he said. "The pace is just breathtaking." Among the papers IBM is presenting is one describing a 64-bit, 1 gigahertz version of the PowerPC processor, a design first co-developed with Motorola and Apple Computer. IBM has said it will begin selling gigahertz PowerPC chips in the second half of the year. IBM also plans to introduce a gigahertz version of the System 390 processor used in its big mainframe computers, Isaac said. The arrival of the gigahertz era comes as no surprise to many engineers. In 1996, Albert Yu, Intel's senior vice president and general manager of the microprocessor products division, wrote a paper predicting that by 2011, clock rates would reach 10 gigahertz, with 2 billion transistors on a single chip. "If anything, I think my estimate was a little conservative," Yu said last week. "What you're seeing at the Solid State Circuits Conference is the beginning of the gigahertz process, but just the beginning. Silicon, from a technical point of view, basically has no limitations down to the atomic level, and we're still far away from the atomic level." Intel will present a paper describing a 1 gigahertz version of the 32-bit Pentium III processor, but it is also expected to release more details of the forthcoming 64-bit Itanium chip, which may or may not make its debut at a gigahertz clock rate. Both chips are planned for production by the second half of the year. This rapid move from project to product is also unprecedented. "When we showed a 100 megahertz 486 in a paper, it took three years to get that into production," Yu recalled, referring to the 486-series chips that were forebears to Intel's Pentium line. "Now we and others are showing papers on gigahertz processors and we're talking production this year." Of course, pushing performance and production at this rate requires a huge investment, and Intel has said it will spend $5 billion on facilities and $3.8 billion on research and development this year. "It takes gigabucks to do gigahertz," said Yu. Intel's archrival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., is not presenting a paper at the conference, but has said it will introduce a gigahertz version of its Athlon processor in the second half of the year.