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To: Don Green who wrote (55964)	9/30/2000 12:05:38 AM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Intel Cancels Timna By Jayant Mathew and Paul Kallender, Electronic News Sep 29, 2000 --- Intel Corp. today cancelled the Timna, its integrated chip targeted at the value segment of the PC market. The news comes at a time when Intel’s stock has lost more than 41 percent of its value following its recent announcement that it expects a revenue shortfall for the third quarter. Worse, Intel has been beset with production problems, delays and glitches for the past year which has caused a domino effect down the supply chain from suppliers to PC OEMs. Timna was slated for the first quarter of 2001 but it was finally shelved after Intel realized that PC OEMs didn’t want the chip because existing solutions were meeting the requirements of the value segment. In addition, Intel said it needed more time to tweak the design before it was ready for production. The cancellation will actually ease Intel’s supply crunch because Intel said Timna’s capacity allocation will now be used to make Celeron’s and 810 chipsets. Analysts have welcomed Intel’s decision because they felt the chip was not adding any value to the consumer. And it didn’t help Intel when glitches delayed the chip. “Intel, much to its credit, decided to bite the bullet,” said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. “Timna was opportunistic, but not strategic.” More important, canceling the chip shows that Intel is not forcing their products on OEMs, like it did with the 820 chipset and Rambus. Intel delayed the Timna because it found bugs in the hub that connects standard-memory to the processor. There had been concerns whether Intel will ever fix the memory translator hub (MTH), a device that is used to communicate between the processor and standard memory. The MTH was designed to allow the Timna, which was meant to support the expensive Rambus memory, to also support standard SDRAM memory. Intel, which was a late entrant to the sub-$1,000 PC market scrambled to design a low-end product to combat Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and VIA Technologies Inc. As a result, Intel decided on an integrated processor that consists of a microprocessor, core logic and graphics on a single chip. Intel, however, chose Rambus as the memory standard for the Timna. The plan backfired because of product delays and high memory prices. “It is a great concept but Timna wasn’t as scalable frequency wise and the delays compounded the issue,” said Kevin Krewell, senior editor of the Microprocessor Report. “And the chip count was not different from a Celeron. This made Intel use standard SDRAM for the Timna, which required an MTH and resulted in Timna becoming a three-chip solution as opposed to a two-chip solution. Moreover, the addition of the MTH increased costs and decreased performance. “It wasn’t an integrated processor and it was going to perform poorly with SD 100 memory and a translation protocol device,” Krewell said. Timna’s cancellation is good news for VIA Technology, which is focusing on the value segment of the market. “VIA seems to be happy and willing to take that,” Krewell said. In addition, this will be exclusively VIA’s space because AMD does not have an offering in this area and its roadmap shows it has no plans for the near future. The reason being it does not have an in house graphics core that can be used for an integrated solution. And since the Duron is scaling pretty well it does not make economic sense for AMD to target the lowest end of the PC market.