To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (48165 ) 2/19/1998 8:12:00 PM From: David S. Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 186894
Paul Fiondella, Don't know why I bother. Check this paste from an earlier post and note the highlighted sentence near the bottom: <<Intel's Grove: Prepare for a billion connected PCs By Randolph Court SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - It was with the same cool, businesslike manner that Intel Corp. unveils each new chip to bolster its dominance across the tech industry that chief executive Andy Grove took the stage Tuesday to address the chipmaker's semi-annual developers forum. With little fanfare he laid out the company's plans for what it calls the P6 microarchitecture -- the basic design that will be incorporated into a family of chips expected to run everything from the most basic home PCs to stacked servers. And the audience packed into the San Jose Convention Center responded in kind, with polite applause withheld until the hourlong program's end. Grove began his speech with a perfunctory history lesson on the evolution of the computer industry, concluding with a conjured fortune-cookie fortune that said: "We're heading to a world of a billion connected computers." He pointed to increased segmentation, from basic computers for beginning home users to high-end servers and workstations. Intel will provide the chips that are the building blocks for all of them, he added, and all will be a variation on Intel's P6 microarchitecture. "The latest P6 architecture is the foundation from top to bottom," Grove said. "That's the theme for this developer forum." Microarchitecture is the basic silicon design that reads in the data and executes software instructions. So far, there are several processors planned to make use of the P6 microarchitecture. For the inexpensive home computer, a processor code-named "Covington" -- with P6 architecture but no level 2 cache for high-speed memory -- will begin shipping later this year. The Pentium II has the P6 core but a big level 2 cache that runs at half the speed of the processor itself. When you step up to the next processor, called Slot 2, you have the P6 architecture and level 2 cache running at the speed of the processor. Grove and a handful of Intel employees walked the audience, numbering around 1,000 people, through a series of demos. First came a video game with high-resolution 3-D graphics running on a Covington processor. This was followed by data mining on a Pentium II with graphic readouts of the results. Grove then moved on to a more sophisticated machine used by professional 3-D animators, and finally a stack of servers running together like a mainframe to process queries on complex data sets.>> Now tell me if Andy Grove would put before a Developer's Conference a complete sham. The Covington is capable of running high resolution 3 D graphics. What do you want for $599, a Sun Workstation? Your 1970's PC mentality has tied your brain in knots, that is the braindead problem you should be concerned about, not Big Brother Intel trying to take over the world. Regards, David S. Long on Intel and Iomega