Samsung Elec. 700 MHZ at .25 mu
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1997 NOV 10 (Newsbytes) -- By Craig Menefee, Newsbytes. Samsung Electronics Company will market its new Alpha chips on PC box-ready motherboards by February of next year. Sources at the company claimed to Newsbytes that the new boards will leave Pentium II systems in the dust and will cost less than equivalent high-end Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] processor boards.
The firm believes in moving fast. It had achieved only low production levels as of September, after licensing the design from Digital Equipment Corp. in mid-1996 and working on the engineering for about a year -- not a long time, considering it was a move into a new technology. Since reaching production, the firm has had problems keeping up with demand and is ramping up production.
The new motherboards will hew to Intel's ATX form factor (successor to the older "baby AT" motherboard) so they will fit into standard PC boxes. The boards should lead to PCs with performance levels over 400 megahertz (MHz) for less than $3,000, Samsung America's Alpha chip project group manager, Y.J. Kim, told Newsbytes.
Kim said his firm will have two versions, the AlphaPC 164UX and AlphaPC 164BX, both available with 400-600MHz 21164 Alpha CPUs (central processing units). The systems will be upgradable in 33MHz increments, said Kim, with an upper limit to reach 700MHz or higher later next year.
The BX model will be "a true desktop system," said Kim, since it will lack the onboard Ultra-Wide SCSI (small computer system interface) and 10/100 megabits-per-second (Mbps) Ethernet adapters of the UX model. Both models will have five 32-bit PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots and one 64-bit PCI slot, plus an ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) slot.
Both boards will accept up to 768 megabytes (MB) of memory using 128MB DRAM DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) or up to three gigabytes (GB) using 512MB DRAM DIMMs, which Kim says Samsung now has in the pipeline.
Both will sport a 128-bit wide high speed cache bus that can handle bandwidths greater than 3 GB/sec, with 128-bit main memory access at greater than 1 GB/sec achievable bandwidth, said Samsung. Both will have either 2MB or 4MB L3 cache.
"Architecture-wise it is wide and very fast," declared Kim. "You can put synchronous DRAM) DIMMs in -- and Samsung is the best supplier of synchronous DRAM."
Alpha-based systems have been very-high-end machines for so long, said Kim, that people often think they always cost $20,000 or more, but low-end Alphas are available now as desktop systems for under $2,000.
"These are affordable systems," Kim declared. "Why wait and pay more for Merced when you can have 64-bit power now for less than a high-end P-II?"
Merced is Intel's 64-bit processor, now under development and due in 1999.
Kim noted Microsoft has said its Windows NT 5.0 will incorporate Digital's FX132 binary translation utility to make native NT applications run without needing an external translator. Translation cuts the speed of an NT application by about 50 percent, but that may not matter much when you start out above 400MHz.
Samsung's move into motherboard production is the latest step in an $8 billion product expansion the firm began in mid-1997, after prices for the firm's staple 16-bit DRAM chips dropped 80 percent and decimated the division's 1996 profits. The expansion took Samsung into microprocessors, special-purpose chips, and other forms of digital hardware.
As reported in late September (Newsbytes, Sept. 26, 1997), only three weeks after achieving production levels on the 21164 Alpha, Samsung announced faster 21264 and 21164PC versions of the chip. Then, at the tail-end of October, the firm quietly announced in a local Korean newspaper that it had produced a .25-micron "shrink" of the Alpha 21164 design that achieved a minimum 700MHz clock rate, making it the world's fastest microprocessor (Newsbytes, Nov. 3, 1997).
Syed Ali, executive director of CPU marketing, called affordable Alpha systems "a key element" of the firm's Alpha strategy. He added: "These new motherboards will enable our original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to offer sub-$3,000 systems with unmatched performance, upgradeability and features."
Reported by Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .
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(19971110/US Press Contact: Y.J. Kim, Samsung, 408-544-4123, E-mail yjkimssi.samsung.com; or International Contact: Syed Ali, Samsung, +82 2-797-7320, E-mail syedalisec.samsung.com/SAMSUNG971104/PHOTO)
Copyright 1997 |
