Covington due in a few months. Covington can't do software DVD decoding...........................................................
news.com
Intel chips to get new brand names
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM
February 17, 1998, 11:15 a.m. PT
Taking a page from the General Motors marketing manual, Intel will market its chips for low-end computers under a new, separate brand name and also develop another new brand for chips targeted at high-end servers and workstations, chief executive officer Andrew Grove told the audience at the Intel Developer's Forum.
The surprise announcement effectively means that there will likely be three different Intel brands presented to the public: An undetermined family name for chips belonging to information applicances, a brand for desktops and low-end servers, and a brand for more upscale servers.
Brand segmentation will also mean product segmentation and segmentation of efforts within Intel, Grove added. Chipsets, graphics subsystems, and motherboards, along with chips designed for specific segment needs, will soon be pouring out of the chip giant.
The segmentation underscores the seriousness with which the company is pursuing low-cost computing, a segment it missed last year. A year ago, there were zero engineers working on low-end chips, said Grove. Now there are 600. Similar efforts are being made for server-designed chips.
"Our plan is to use the latest P6 microarchitecture as the foundation of our product line from top to bottom. The products will be specially designed to the application needs of the products," Grove said, later adding, "The processor alone is not enough. We must have motherboards and chipsets" that complement the processor. P6 is the official name for the Pentium II architecture.
"The processors will differ by brand name in order to highlight the benefits of the product line," he further explained. "You will see the segmentation of our road map. 'XYZ' processors for the basic PC and Pentium 2 'ABC' processors for server applications.
Both XYZ and ABC are hypothetical names, Grove explained. The brand names for these segments have not yet been determined, but will be determined by the time the products roll out.
Which will be soon. Intel's first low-end chip, code-named Covington, will appear in the next few months, said Grove. Covington is a Pentium II core chip without a secondary "cache" memory. "It comes in a Pentium II package but it substantially less expensive," he said. Grove's use of the word Covington marked the first time an Intel executive has acknowledged the name.
Successors to Covington will also begin to incorporate functions performed elsewhere in the chipsets and motherboards as a way to cut costs.
Grove did not indicate whether Covington would carry the new brand name, but his comments seem to make it inevitable.
High-end server chips based around the "Slot 2" Pentium II design will come out in the near future as well, he said. These chips will be marketed under the new brand name. Slot 2 describes the package of the chip and how the chip connects to the computer. The design, which allows Intel to boost the system bus to 100 MHz and increase the size of the cache, will be used for high-end chips only. A bus is a data pathway, in this case from the microprocessor.
The similar, but smaller, "Slot 1" design will continue to be used for desktop chips as well as for chips for foreseeable lower-end devices. Covington, he said, will use the Slot 1 design.
On a similar note, Grove said that Intel would come out with its 64-bit "Merced" architecture in 1999, but that the architecture would remain strictly a high-end technology in the future. Desktop chips will continue to be based around the IA-32, or 32-bit, architecture.
Ambitious as the plan is, it is a work in progress, observers noted. The "cacheless" Covington chip, for instance, is essentially a stopgap measure, Ashok Kumar, a semiconductor analyst, pointed out recently. Intel will likely shift its low-end efforts to an upcoming low-end Pentium II with integrated secondary cache memory. The Pentium II core was designed to work with a secondary cache. Without it, the processor doesn't work as well, numerous observers and analysts have said. |
