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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (128792)	3/2/2001 10:32:23 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul, Intel longs, Dell, Toshiba: We want Intel's power-saving chip....Knock at Transmeta? Frank Spindler, general manager of Intel's mobile and handheld products group, has said that about 60 percent of the notebook market will migrate to the "thin-and-light segment" over the next few years. Will AMD's upcoming (???) notebook chips qualify for the thin and light notebooks? zdnet.com Dell Computer and Toshiba are the first major notebook makers to sign up for Intel's new 700MHz power-saving mobile Pentium III chip. Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) released the chip Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif. Meanwhile, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) announced its plans to use the chip in the Latitude L400. And Toshiba (Nasdaq: TOSBF) said it will use the processor in its Portege 3490CT. Both of these systems are considered mini-notebooks, which have slightly smaller keyboards than regular notebooks and screen sizes of 11 inches to 12 inches. Both the Dell and Toshiba models weigh just over 3 pounds. Dell's is an inch thick, and Toshiba's is 0.8 inches thick. Manufacturers are trying to take advantage of notebooks--the one area in the PC market where sales are still strong. The mini-notebook, however, is the one category within notebooks that gets a lot of attention for its sex appeal but has yet to start selling in large numbers. SpeedStep family As previously reported, the new Pentium III chip falls into the SpeedStep family of Intel processors, in which a chip alters its clock speed depending on its source of power. The point of SpeedStep technology is to preserve battery life without sacrificing too much performance. The new chip takes an aggressive approach to power management by reducing the clock speed even further than previous generations of SpeedStep chips. When a notebook is running on battery power, the 700MHz chip drops the clock speed by 200MHz. Previous chips only reduced clock speed by 100MHz. Manufacturers have been trying to improve power consumption and improved battery life by hedging on performance. "The only issue that is a bit of an unknown is: At what point do you trade off performance vs. the amount of power you give up to get there?" said Steve Macon, Dell's product manager for the L400. Growth seen in 'thin-and-light' segment However, Dell sees its efforts to strike a balance as worthwhile because of the strong growth expected in the mini-notebook market. Frank Spindler, general manager of Intel's mobile and handheld products group, has said that about 60 percent of the notebook market will migrate to the "thin-and-light segment" over the next few years. Intel rival Transmeta seems to agree, putting an emphasis on chips for smaller and lighter notebooks with increased battery life. Transmeta is currently shipping a 667MHz Crusoe chip in a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VN PictureBook mini-notebook that directly competes with Intel's new 700MHz counterpart. "We are seeing very strong growth" in mini-notebooks, Macon said. The L400 is "the first step, and going forward you'll see us focus on this piece of our portfolio." Dell's Latitude L400 has a magnesium alloy cover. The $2,159 notebook comes with a 12.1-inch screen, 128MB of SDRAM, a 6GB hard drive, 4MB of graphics memory, V.90 56K modem and an integrated Ethernet port. Toshiba's Portege 3490CT costs $2,399 and comes with an 11.3-inch screen, 128MB of SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive, 4MB of graphics memory and an integrated V.90 56K modem and Ethernet connection.

To: Paul Engel who wrote (128792)	3/2/2001 10:52:16 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Here's a writer that has little clue, and I thought EE Times was better. Guy is saying Serverworks is beating Intel to the DDR chipset punch for the P4, then goes on to describe the Serverworks chipset for DP and MP Foster, which he calls two- or four-way Xeon. OK, Intel is dropping the "Pentium" label for Foster. I don't think Intel ever had plans for Foster, though, at least early on. Serverworks serves an important role in getting chipsets out there early for the OEMs to use in designing servers around their and Intel's new chips. Confused? eet.com ServerWorks chip set beats Intel to the DDR punch By Anthony Cataldo EE Times (03/01/01, 6:05 p.m. EST) SAN JOSE, Calif. — ServerWorks Inc. is looking to steal some limelight from Intel Corp. by rolling out its first chip set for the Pentium 4 processor later this year. The ServerWorks chip set leans heavily on double-data-rate DRAMs to feed the wide Pentium 4 front-side bus and includes several features designed to protect the system against faulty memory bits. Designed for two- or four-way Xeon-based systems, the chip set is set to go into volume production starting in the third quarter. That should put ServerWorks a step ahead of Intel's chip set group, which won't have its DDR-based chip set for servers ready until early 2002. While Intel is looking to deploy RDRAM on its various platforms "top to bottom," DDR will have a place in servers since those platforms are not constrained by the higher pin counts of that high-speed successor to SDRAM, said Intel Fellow Pete MacWilliams, who oversees Intel's Memory Enabling Group. But MacWilliams said the company is taking precautions to ensure that it doesn't run into problems after it has defined its DDR platform the way it did with its first RDRAM implementation. Intel is preparing an addendum to the Jedec DDR spec so that DRAM makers will adhere to Intel's own requirements, he said. "Intel is not trying to create another version of DDR; we only want to make sure that the one that's out there can be made to work on a robust platform," MacWilliams said. ServerWorks doesn't take system reliability for granted either, said David Pulling, executive vice president of marketing and sales for the Santa Clara, Calif., company, which was acquired by Broadcom Corp. in January. , ServerWorks usually works with a customer for six months before finalizing a platform, he said. "System validation is probably the single biggest investment we've made as a company," Pulling said. ServerWorks' Grand Champion chip set uses DDR-200 devices to deliver up to 6.4 Gbytes/second of memory bandwidth, four times faster than the company's previous-generation chip set, based on PC133 SDRAMs. The design accommodates up to 16 registered PC1600 dual-in-line memory modules (DIMMs) with capacities of 128 Mbytes to 2 Gbytes, for a maximum 32 Gbytes of system memory. As server memory capacities rise, so do the chances of encountering faulty bits or a bad memory, said Pulling. To address those reliability concerns, the chip set was designed to support hot-plug memory, to allow memory upgrades during operation; a memory mirror option, which enables data to be written to a redundant memory subsystem; chip kill; and a 128-bit ECC algorithm licensed from IBM that corrects quad-bit errors and detects 8-bit errors. On the I/O side, ServerWorks designed in dual-channel support for the 64-bit/100-MHz PCI-X bus. Each PCI-X controller runs in full-duplex mode, transferring data in 2-byte intervals through a bidirectional point-to-point connection with the system I/O north bridge controller. "There's no need for bus arbitration, and you're only two clocks away from main memory," Pulling said.