Ibexx, Here is the i740's performance reviewe from industry analysts
The last pararaph is interesting but not new news to everone.
The question is when Intel is gong to add graphic into CPU for mobile PC.
techweb.com.
Intel Graphics Chip Leads The Pack
(02/12/98; 11:33 a.m. EST)
By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News Ending months of speculation, Intel has entered the graphics market by racing straight to the head of the pack.
The company's new chip, the i740 2D/3D/video graphics processor, is scheduled to be unveiled Thursday. According to Intel customer STB Systems, the chip generates a 3-D AGP benchmarking score higher than any of its competitors -- a performance verified by independent industry analysts.
"For a first-time entry, Intel's part is very good," said Andy Fischer, analyst for Jon Peddie Associates (JPA), in Tiburon, Calif., who characterized it as "a wake-up call to the industry."
But Intel's lightning charge won't necessarily succeed in shouldering aside rival graphics chip makers, Fischer said. "Competitors will still generate design wins with their AGP parts, and at much lower prices," he said. Still, even those competitors acknowledged Intel's challenge as a formidable one.
"Intel is very well-positioned to take a major portion of the market," said Jay Eisenlohr, vice president of corporate marketing with Rendition, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Intel's entry is being backed by five add-on card manufacturers, all of whom have pledged to support the i740: Taiwan's ASUStek, plus Diamond Multimedia, STB, Number Nine, and Real3D.
Much as it did in presenting its AGP specification, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel characterized the i740 as an important component in its visual computing initiative. The i740 is fully 2X AGP-compliant, loading textures directly from a PC's main memory.
"This is a graphics controller for mainstream markets, and it adds value to the Pentium II platform," said Robert M. Gregory, director of graphics marketing for Intel's Platform Components Division, in Folsom, Calif. The i740 "is not intended to compete in all segments of the market," he said. The chip is intended to be the "leading performance chip in the mainstream performance segment."
And that's where Intel's market impact becomes confusing, analysts said. In the increasingly crowded world of graphics accelerators, addressing the "mainstream performance segment" means the i740 is designed to accelerate Microsoft's Direct3D and Silicon Graphics' OpenGL APIs, Gregory said.
That performance was in question last year, when Intel sandbagged industry watchers by displaying a slower, 0.6-micron version of the i740.
The new 0.35-micron production version now includes 3.3 million transistors inside a whopping 450-square-millimeter die, Intel executives said. At peak output, the chip consumes 5.7 watts at 66 MHz. Intel is expected to move to 0.25 micron when its next-generation graphics chip, code-named Portola, ships in 1999.
From a raw performance standpoint, analysts said Intel's chief competition won't come from S3, as once thought, but from 3Dfx Interactive, Nvidia, and Rendition -- none of which play by the same rules.
In documents filed in its public offering, for example, 3Dfx characterized the use of its own API, Glide, as a competitive advantage. Although Intel licensed an early version of Glide, it decided not to accelerate Glide in favor of Direct3D, said Brian Ekiss, Intel's graphics marketing manager. At least 47 shipping PC games are written specifically for 3Dfx's hardware alone, according to the company.
"We're focused in a separate segment of the market from Intel, specifically on games," said Andy Keane, vice president of marketing at 3Dfx, in San Jose, Calif. "The graphics market has become divided between [Direct3D] compatibility and entertainment."
Rendition also uses a proprietary API, RRedline. Both Rendition and 3Dfx's products also accelerate Direct3D.
In addition, the chips don't accelerate all the same functions. The Voodoo Graphics chip set from 3Dfx is merely a 3-D-only controller. Rendition's V2200 and NVidia's Riva 128 are 2-D/3-D/video controllers.
By contrast, Intel's i740 is designed to accelerate 2-D and 3-D graphics, video, and even software decompression of MPEG-2/AC-3 data on DVDs. The chip is designed to output its information to televisions via a Brooktree decoder, or interface gluelessly to a low-cost DVD decoder from C-Cube Microsystems.
The i740 processes 1.1 million Gouraud-shaded polygons and 45 million to 55 million pixels per second, at peak performance. On average, from 425,000 to 500,000 polygons and 45 million to 55 million pixels are processed, using 140 pixels per triangle with many features enabled.
In Intel's parallel data-processing architecture, pixels are processed in parallel, 15 at a time. Graphics features such as mip mapping, color alpha blending, fog, bilinear filtering, specular lighting, edge anti-aliasing, and z-buffering are applied on a per-pixel basis.
Many of those same graphics features are echoed in competitors' chips, analysts said. The question, they said, is if Intel can do it at a lower cost.
According to Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz., "performance-class" graphics chip prices have dropped from $25 to $30 to lower than $20 in volume. The i740 is sampling at $29.75 in volumes of 10,000, and will enter production in March.
"I'm just not sure the Intel name is going to command a premium," JPA's Fischer said.
Two things are certain, analysts concluded: The frenzied competition in the graphics market means Intel neither enjoys the same relative advantage as it does in microprocessors, nor the same margins.
"In the grand scheme of things, Intel's presence in the graphics market means almost nothing," perhaps $0.02 to $0.06 per share, said Scott Randall, analyst with SoundView Financial Group, in Stamford, Conn.
But Intel's graphics chip adds a new revenue stream at the same time it makes it tougher for competitors like Advanced Micro Devices to compete, he added.
Competitors and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns that Intel would leverage its might in microprocessors and core logic chip sets to gain an unfair advantage in the graphics arena.
Intel executives reiterated that they may integrate the graphics chip into its core logic. "We will not rule out integration if it makes sense to our customers," Gregory said. |
