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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hpeace who wrote (16633)	2/4/1998 7:55:00 PM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Michael Dell admits that the CPQ/DEC merger will make life a little more difficult. See Yahoo news. s.

To: hpeace who wrote (16633)	2/4/1998 10:59:00 PM
From: Jorge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Steve......I noticed there aren't the large number of bears jabbing at the bulls today, like there was a few days ago......I still say this puppy's going to 100 by year 2000 ..........George

To: hpeace who wrote (16633)	2/5/1998 2:09:00 PM
From: Kevin Chesser	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Steve, I haven't seen this posted. Any comments on Digital's Alpha vs. IBM Guts for gigahertz speed? Kevin February 4, 1998 IBM and Digital to Report on New Super-Chips By JOHN MARKOFF AN FRANCISCO -- The surging power of the microprocessor chip is approaching another milestone. Both IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. will present technical papers Wednesday at a conference here describing experimental chips that operate at more than one billion cycles a second -- or three times the speed of today's most powerful personal-computer chips. Though the chips will not be commercially available until after the turn of the century, the race to the so-called gigahertz speed has touched off a battle for bragging rights between the two computer giants, with each claiming the title of developer of the world's fastest general-purpose computing chip. While the actual announcements will be made in the form of dry technical papers at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, scheduled to begin in San Francisco on Wednesday, that did not prevent Digital Equipment from jumping the gun Monday by issuing a news release that said it was introducing a new family of chips called the Alpha 21264 that will break the gigahertz speed barrier -- though not until 2000. That notice, two years before the chips are to be available, caused IBM officials to complain that Digital had decided to jump the gun after it had learned that IBM was preparing to announce its prototype version of a partly working version of a 1,000 MHz chip that is running in a laboratory. Digital, which agreed last week to be acquired by Compaq Computer Corp., is racing against IBM, the MIPS unit of Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to stay ahead of the increasingly powerful Intel Pentium microprocessor chips, which recently reached speeds of 333 MHz. For its part, Intel, at another technical conference last fall, already provided word of the chip that it hopes will be the successor to the Pentium. Designed with researchers from the Hewlett-Packard Co., this chip, called the Merced, is also supposed to be faster than 1,000 MHz. Of the technological advances to be detailed at the conference this week, IBM's appears to be more impressive than that of Digital, which until now has generally been accepted as the industry leader, providing the fastest commercially available microprocessors. IBM researchers will announce that they have achieved a working version of a chip with the core functions of a Power PC microprocessor operating at 1,000 MHz. The IBM announcement is particularly striking, computer designers said, because the researchers have reached the 1,000 MHz mark with consumption of power that matches that of today's conventional microprocessors. By contrast, other high-speed microprocessors, such as Digital's Alpha, draw more power and consequently run much hotter, making it potentially less practical for consumer applications. The new IBM chip, which was nicknamed GUTS by the team of 15 IBM engineers that designed it at an IBM research laboratory in Austin, Texas, draws only 6.3 watts of power, far less than the Alpha chip. The IBM design feat was achieved by the careful placement of individual transistors on the chip, thereby painstakingly reducing the length of the wires that connect the transistors. Longer connections between components on a chip tend to slow execution speeds and generate excess heat. "There are no cooling tricks in our microprocessor," said Randy Isaac, an IBM vice president for systems technology and science. "This runs at standard room temperature." IBM was able to reach the gigahertz speed without resorting to the use of copper, an element the company recently discovered will substantially increase the speed of conventional chips. Mr. Isaac said that the company would soon merge its layout advance with its material advances to significantly increase the speed of its commercial microprocessors. IBM reached the gigahertz speed mark using a standard semiconductor process that uses silicon instead of more exotic materials like gallium arsenide. That is an important endorsement for that technology, which is used in thousands of different consumer products. Home \| Sections \| Contents \| Search \| Forums \| Help Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company