Digital's deal may tie up StrongARM
Digital/Intel: StrongARM
The article gave me the impression that StrongARM chips might be delayed, but states at the end that any chip that will be used for I2O will be using WIND (Not that we didn't already know this.)
PS - Allen, in regards to your latest post, I have been on the edge of my seat for over a year. I DO continue to see the story unfolding (often more positively than I had previously envisioned) and am VERY excited about our (WIND's) future. You truly are an excellent professor.
Darryl
November 03, 1997, Issue: 979
Section: News
Digital's deal may tie up StrongARM
techweb.com
By Peter Clarke and Ron Wilson
Santa Clara, Calif. - What ostensibly began as a patent dispute between CPU
developers at Digital Equipment Corp. and Intel Corp. has become a
watershed agreement, reshaping Digital. But it has also become a tale of two
very different CPUs, with perhaps two very different fates.
If the agreement is approved by the U.S. government, the Alpha architecture,
which has led the computer industry in benchmark performance, could
become a secondary CPU in Digital's portfolio, the product of a fabless
design team. Perhaps more significantly, Digital's StrongARM processor has
been inadvertently caught up in the agreement, with potential implication
reaching from set-top boxes to supercomputers.
Under the proposed agreement announced last week, Digital and Intel would
sign a wide-ranging cross-licensing agreement. Digital would agree to port its
Unix to the IA-64 architecture, and to develop IA-64-based systems.
At the same time, Intel would in essence purchase Digital Semiconductor for
$700 million, including the Hudson, Mass., fab and Digital semiconductor
design teams in Israel, Austin, Texas, and Palo Alto, Calif. Of the original
semiconductor operation, only the Alpha CPU design team would remain at
Digital.
Under the agreement, Intel would provide Alpha CPUs to Digital on a
foundry basis. To that end, Intel plans to leave a portion of the Hudson fab
set up for Digital's existing 0.35-micron process, according to an Intel
spokesman. "Even the part of Hudson that is facilitized is only about 30 to 50
percent utilized," one source said. "Intel plans to leave a portion of that
equipment in place to build Alpha, and to fill out the space with its own
0.25-micron process."
Besides the Hudson line, Digital could call on its licensees, Samsung Corp.
and Mitsubishi Electronics, to provide Alpha chips. Mitsubishi developed the
21164PC chip for Digital, and Samsung is reportedly seeing excellent yields
on Alpha chips.
The Alpha design team at Digital is also reportedly investigating a port of the
advanced Alpha CPUs to Intel's process. That would permit Intel to supply
Digital's needs from any of a number of Intel fabs, and would greatly simplify
the forecast requirements under which Digital might have to live.
Yet even with these contingencies, there is a feeling within Digital that the
move to IA-64 may signal the end of Digital as a computer company with its
own architecture. "I came here because this was an old-time engineering
company and it's painful to see the company flounder so much," said a Digital
engineer who wished not to be identified. "Tactically it's good to have the
relationship with Intel back in place, because that is a huge benefit. But the
agreement doesn't give us any better sense of what we should design."
If the future for Alpha is cloudy, the situation for other Digital Semiconductor
products is far less clear. "A lot of products came rolled up in the package,"
said an Intel spokesman. "We are currently beginning to evaluate them as
potential Intel products. But we are under no obligation to continue building
any chips not used in key Digital products."
StrongARM anchor
Among the products Intel stands to inherit is a range of Ethernet chips that
analysts say have garnered Digital significant market share. But perhaps most
important is Digital's StrongARM CPU. Licensed from Advanced RISC
Machines Ltd., StrongARM anchors the high end of the ARM architecture,
and extends the family into network computers, set-top boxes and the
communications infrastructure.
But the future of StrongARM is now far from clear. Reynette Au, vice
president of marketing for ARM, said: "Digital was the sole supplier of
StrongARM, but the fundamental architecture belongs to ARM. We have
licensees who would be capable of bringing out StrongARM chips." Au
pointed out that Samsung-already an ARM licensee-and Mitsubishi are both
licensed to use the specialized 0.35-micron CMOS process for which the first
StrongARM implementations were targeted, those companies might be
persuaded to make StrongARM chips, either as licensees or on a foundry
basis, he said.
However, if Intel opposed the transfer to alternate sources of the three
existing StrongARM implementations-the SA-110, SA-1100 and
SA-1500-ARM might prefer to do some redesign of the StrongARM.
Au said that the basic SA-1 CPU core hard macro belongs wholly to ARM
and is licensed to Digital. The caches and memory-management unit which
were added to create the SA-110, and the peripherals used to create the
SA-1100, were jointly developed and are jointly owned by ARM and Digital,
as are the complete designs. Intel and ARM must still "renegotiate the terms
of the StrongARM relationship," Au said.
Au said ARM would be discussing the possibilities with Intel, Samsung,
Mitsubishi and others during the period of government investigation-estimated
at up to six months-into whether the Intel-Digital deal should be allowed to go
through.
For Intel, the issue is equally complex. Intel would acquire the StrongARM
design team in Austin as part of the Digital agreement. But the company has
not yet evaluated whether it even wants to be in the ARM business. "That is
an issue of embedded strategy," the corporate spokesman said. "And no one
involved in Intel's embedded strategy was included in the negotiating team. So
they are just beginning to look at this issue."
The stakes are large, and span a remarkable range of markets. The major
customers for StrongARM include Apple Computer Inc., which uses the chip
in its Newton MessagePad product line, and Oracle Corp., which has
designed StrongARM into a version of its Network Computer. Neither
product line has exactly been a favorite of Intel strategists in the past.
The CE connection
A more equivocal situation involves Windows CE. While most analysts have
judged Intel's Pentium processors too large to make practical use of CE,
StrongARM has been suggested as a platform for CE-based subnotebooks.
A designer working on a class of StrongArm-based subnotebooks using CE
said it's too early to tell what impact the Digital/Intel agreement will have on
the StrongARM. A CE-to-StrongARM port is in the works, but is not
expected to ship in a finished form until early next year. However, Digital
might show beta versions of StrongARM/CE subnotebooks or network
terminals at Comdex/Fall this month. "I'm sure Intel will honor any contracts
people have to use the StrongARM or CE running on it, but for those who
are on the fence or were looking out for second- or third-generation
products, this deal could raise problems," the designer commented.
A further quandary emerges in, of all places, the bowels of big servers and
supercomputers. Intel has gone to great lengths to promote its own i960
embedded CPU as the processor for Intelligent I/O (I2O) systems. But
StrongARM, particularly in Intel's hands, could prove a superior alternative.
The I2O Special Interest Group, whose members-such as AST Research,
Compaq, Dell, HP and IBM-are rolling out some of their first servers early
next year based on the spec, are mainly using i960 processors. But the group
has shown growing interest in using the StrongARM chip. The IxWorks
RTOS from Wind River, at the core of the I2O technology, has been ported
to StrongARM.
So far, most developers have used the i960, partly because of its
long-standing support for the Wind River RTOS, said Michael Rex, a senior
marketing engineer in Intel's Enterprise Server Group, who acts as a
spokesman for the I2O SIG. But the I2O spec is written to be
hardware-neutral, which has opened the door to experiments with
StrongARM and other chips that support the Wind River RTOS.
-Additional reporting by Rick Boyd-Merritt.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc. |
