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To: Paul Engel who wrote (108222)	8/24/2000 10:23:42 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 186894

Intel in your cell By Phil Harvey Redherring.com, August 24, 2000 SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA -- At the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Developers' Forum (IDF) here Wednesday, Intel announced its new communications chip architecture, called Xscale. The chips coming from this new line are expected to operate using very little power, and they'll run at speeds approaching 1 GHz, Intel executives said. This chip architecture, which is based on Intel's StrongARM chip technology, is expected to show up in Internet-ready cell phones and other handheld devices later this year, says Ron Smith, the vice president and general manager of Intel's wireless computing group. Watching Intel announce this technology while also addressing news that Microsoft is developing a communications chip for interactive TV was corporate theater at its finest. Out of one side of its mouth, Intel pooh-poohs the Microsoft news, saying that developing chips for interactive TV is an application-specific task, something that isn't Intel's forte. Out of the other side, Intel says that the reason it's making chips for wireless phones -- a pretty specific application if you ask me -- is that it is one of the hottest markets driving the demand for integrated circuitry. Bravo. PARANOIA DU JOUR Everyone's favorite sound byte from IDF so far has been Intel CEO Craig Barrett's joke that Sun's method of designing its own software and hardware was akin to communism. What Mr. Barrett would prefer, obviously, is that the server market work like the PC market, where there's a choice of hardware components and software platforms. Mr. Barrett, whose firm has been Microsoft's Siamese twin during the rise and continued dominance of the PC, is perhaps showing his bitterness that Sun's and Intel's plans to run Sun's OS on Intel's chips never panned out. Or, as some IT managers here have suggested, it may be that deep down, Mr. Barrett knows that Sun's servers are hard to uproot in an enterprise, even if there are other combinations of hardware and software that yield slightly faster servers. They say it will take much more than Mr. Barrett's mouth to change the buying habits of IT managers who'd prefer to err on the side of caution and not bet against Sun. PEER-TO-PEER PROMISES Show attendees may have a hard time finding an empty seat during a planned series of discussions on peer-to-peer networking at IDF. Industry analyst Cheryl Currid, president of Currid & Company, will lead one peer-to-peer panel that folks here are already talking about. "I'm going to try and keep the discussion focused on what peer-to-peer networking is outside of Napster," she says, referring to Napster's popularity as the "greatest beta-test on the planet." Her panelists will include Dan Beldy, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Napster's sugar daddy; Groove Networks's Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes; United Devices's CTO David Anderson, who directs the SETI@home project; and others. Only recently has there been enough bandwidth and processing power available to corporate users for them to run their own distributed computing projects, Ms. Currid says. With the success of Napster, though, corporations may soon be brave enough to try their own versions of Popular Power, a firm that pays volunteers to work on small chunks of huge computational projects. "I don't know that [peer-to-peer networking] is too fringy for corporations, assuming we can get a standards body together to make it all safe, sane, and secure," Ms. Currid says. Peer-to-peer proponents say the technology's success will change the way IT managers think of buying computers, perhaps spurring them to buy for power rather than price. "You start to think of buying desktop hardware as buying a PC by day and a server on a distributed computing architecture at night. It's cheaper than the next mainframe," Ms. Currid says. Discuss chip and hardware trends in the Chips and Hardware discussion forum, or check out forums, video, and events at the Discussions home page. ©1997-2000 Red Herring Communications. All Rights Reserved.

To: Paul Engel who wrote (108222)	8/24/2000 10:43:24 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel offers details behind Pentium 4 performance increase By Jack Robertson Electronic Buyers' News (08/24/00, 10:03:04 AM EDT) SAN JOSE -- Countering claims made recently by an industry microprocessor research firm, Intel Corp. at this week's Intel Developer Forum here said the upcoming Pentium 4 has no deep pipeline performance penalty. Intel executives here at IDF detailed the Pentium 4's NetBursttechnology, which they said significantly increases performance over other processors, while nearly doubling the number of processor pipeline stages. Jeff Austin, Intel's IA-32 architect launch manager, said the Pentium 4's 20-stage pipeline suffers no penalty for pre-fetch misprediction because of its use of the NetBurst technology. Misprediction, which sounds like an arcane technical question, is a key performance factor. To increase the speed of operations and data rates, modern processors literally try to guess in advance what data will be needed. If the processor guesses wrong, a deep 20-stage pipeline such as Pentium 4 can take up to 13 clock cycles to purge all the data and be refilled, slowing operations. Bert McComas, an analyst at InQuest Research Inc. in Gilbert, Ariz., claimed recently that the pre-fetch misprediction problem causes the 1.4-GHz Pentium 4 to operate at the same performance level as the 1.13-GHz Pentium III. Intel's Austin, however, said NetBurst corrects most of the miprediction problem, with the Pentium 4 performing at the highest level of any Intel processor to date. Allowing the deep Pentium 4 pipeline to meet performance targets is only one of NetBurst's goals, as the device also aims to provide much faster integer and floating-point-instruction operations. NetBurst includes Advanced Dynamic Execution, a speculative engine that helps increase memory pre-fetch prediction rates greatly, according to Intel. The technique uses three times as many instructions operating in pre-fetch as the Pentium III and includes more sophisticated algorithms that look at many prior executions before making a prediction on data to be accessed, Austin said. The Pentium 4 also features a Level 1 on-chip cache that executes already decoded instructions, thus eliminating latency delays. The L1 cache of the Pentium III, in comparison, must decode instructions each time they are issued, slowing the speed at which data is fed to the processor. NetBurst's Rapid Execution Engine is another feature and includes an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) integer-processor running at 2.8 GHz, which is twice the main-processor clock speed and provides extremely rapid processing of integer instructions, according to Austin. A new Streaming SIMD-2 Extension in NetBurst also speeds processing by operating arithmetic integer operations at 128 bits every clock cycle, twice as fast as Penitum III. Additionally, Intel said, the NetBurst adds a 128-bit double precision float point operation not found in the Pentium III.