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To: Brian Hutcheson who wrote (5374)	3/31/1998 9:01:00 AM
From: Dave Parr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6843

New Intel chip for cheap PCs trails rivals-report Tuesday March 31, 7:59 am Eastern Time biz.yahoo.com SAN FRANCISCO, March 31 (Reuters) - A new, much-anticipated chip developed by Intel Corp. (INTC - news) aimed at the sub-$1,000 PC market is not as fast running applications as its clone competitors, according to tests performed by computer magazine PC World. The chip, called Celeron, is expected to be launched on April 15, but PC World said it obtained a pre-production personal computer with a Celeron chip running at a speed of 266 megahertz. ''PC World completed the first road tests of the processor, which indicate that Intel's rivals are still ahead in both price and performance,'' PC World said in a statement. Bill Snyder, senior news editor at PC World, said that while the chip runs at its expected speed of 266 megahertz, its performance running software applications is slower than the performance of rival chips developed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD - news) and National Semiconductor Corp. (NSM - news) unit Cyrix Corp. ''The thing is pretty slow,'' Snyder said. ''There is no doubt in my mind that ... why it's slow is because of the lack of secondary cache. Take away the secondary cache and you get a big hit to performance.'' Intel has said that Celeron will have no L2 or level two cache, which is a reserved section of the chip for storing memory, in order to make a chip that can address the low-cost computing market. PC World said it tested the chip running applications such as Microsoft Corp [Nasdaq:MSFT - news].'s MSFT.O Excel spreadsheet program; Microsoft Word, its word processing program; the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, made by International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM - news) Lotus Development Corp.; Lotus word processing program WordPro; and a few other business applications. ''We don't know what the magazine has in terms of a test system,'' said Intel spokesman Howard High. ''What we have seen historically -- if you look back at other chips like Klamath and others -- a number of publications get pre-production products, and when the real product comes out, they wind up having to recant and reposition their words.'' PC World wrote in its article in the May issue that the chip was close to the final version but that sources close to Intel said the final version of the chip may offer slightly better performance. ''Nevertheless, PC vendors privately express little enthusiasm over the new chip's performance,'' PC World said. PC World wrote that Celeron fails to live up to its name, which comes from the Latin word ''celer,'' meaning speed. PC World, a monthly computer magazine published in San Francisco, said it has a circulation of over 1.1 million. Have a good day, Dave