Intel, AMD square off with new, faster chips
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 7 (Reuters) - Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices, fierce rivals in the microprocessor market, on Monday unveiled their smallest and fastest-ever chips, enabling more powerful applications, such as games, streaming music and video, and office software packages.
Advanced Micro Devices <AMD.N> launched its Athlon XP 2000+, which runs at 1.67 gigahertz, or 1.67 billion cycles a second, while Intel unveiled its new Pentium 4 chip, running at 2.2 gigahertz, analysts said.
Intel's <INTC.O> previous fastest chip was the Pentium 4 running at 2 gigahertz, and Advanced Micro's was its Athlon XP1900+, which runs at 1.6 gigahertz. Last year, AMD briefly claimed the fastest running microprocessor, the primary computing engine of personal computers, although Intel has since pulled ahead.
AMD, which has struggled to convince major personal computer makers to use its chips, said Compaq Computer Corp. <CPQ.N> and Hewlett-Packard Co. <HWP.N> signed on to use the new XP 2000+ processor in their computers.
Other computer makers, such as Dell Computer Corp. are selling systems using the latest Pentium 4, and Intel began producing the chips in large quantities several months ago.
Intel also said that its 845 chipset, which connects the microprocessor to the rest of the computer, now uses DDR, or double data rate, dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips. DDR DRAM is faster than both standard DRAM and SDRAM chips.
Intel now has chipsets that support SDRAM, DDR DRAM and Rambus DRAM, or RDRAM.
FASTER PERFORMANCE
The faster chips mean faster performance when playing video games or burning CDs and allows for higher-performance video, for example.
Intel's Pentium 4 chip marks its biggest move yet into making chips with smaller geometries. Currently, Intel's Pentium 4 chip has components that are as little as 0.18 microns wide. With the chips being announced on Monday, those dimensions will shrink to as little as 0.13 microns.
By comparison, the width of a human hair is about 50 microns.
"What's new and interesting here is Intel is now moving the Pentium 4 into 0.13, which is a necessity in terms of die size and costs," Scovel said, referring to the size of the chip itself and the equipment used to make it.
"The Pentium 4 in round numbers has about twice as many transistors as the Pentium III," Scovel said. "This in my opinion gets the die size down to where it probably should have been when it was first introduced."
The smaller line widths on the chips mean they cost less to produce, because more chips can be manufactured from a single wafer. It also boosts performance, because more transistors can be packed into a single processor.
AMD late last year revamped the branding strategy for its processors, naming them Athlon XP 1700, 1800, 1900, and, now, 2000, to refer to what it said was the overall performance of the individual processor. It was also an effort to try and move consumers away from focusing on the clock speed of the chip, which, in microprocessors, is now measured in gigahertz.
Shares of Intel fell 52 cents to $35.27 while shares of AMD declined 2 cents to $19.98.
16:33 01-07-02
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