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To: Don Dorsey who wrote (33423)	5/26/1998 8:51:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Firewire slows down................................................ ijumpstart.com INTEL PUTS 1394 CORE LOGIC ON HOLD GOOD NEWS FOR OTHER SILICON VENDORS AND MAYBE APPLE Citing lack of customer demand, Intel Corp. [INTC] executives have altered their 1394 road map and will not incorporate the bus into a chipset this year. The step backward comes at a time when support for the bandwidth-buster technology is growing from consumer electronics companies (see MMW, May 18, p. 6) and may deter those manufacturers from moving forward with convergence products. An Intel motherboard implementation would be a tremendous market enabler and probably the quickest way to drive down the cost of silicon necessary to implement the bus. On a positive note, Intel's decision opens a broader market opportunity for vendors focused on the 1394 chip and add-in card business. And it may give Apple Computer Inc., [AAPL] which still plans to offer 1394 motherboard support this year, to differentiate and revive the Mac. Intel began notifying OEMs of the change a few weeks ago and at least one silicon vendor is benefitting. "Over the last three weeks, we've gotten many times the number of orders for our OpenHCI to PCI controller business, said Larry Blackledge, business manager for Texas Instruments Inc.'s [TXN] bus solutions group. "Overnight we had several companies calling us." Microsoft Corp. [MSFT] will support silicon that conforms to the OpenHCI specification in Windows 98. (see MMW, March 4, p.1) Adaptec Inc. [ADPT] is working on an OpenHCI host adapter, which it expects to ship this fall. Jean-Eric Garnier, Adaptec business and marketing manager for 1394, said Intel's decision hasn't impacted orders for 1394 host adapters or software products. "Everyone is still trying to figure out what the real implications is," he said. Incentive for Apple? Apple executives may have more incentive to bring Firewire-enabled Macs to the market now that Intel has put 1394 core logic on hold. A competitively priced Mac with 1394 on the motherboard bundled with the recently acquired Final Cut video-editing tool (see MMW, May 11, 1998) might be just the product Apple needs to prevent content creators from jumping ship to Windows NT. Philips Schiller, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing, would not indicate when Apple will bring 1394 to the motherboard. The company recently made a Firewire DV add-in card available for the 300 MHz PowerMac G3. (see MMW, March 25, p. 3) (Intel, 408/765-8080; Adaptec, 408/945-8600; Texas Instruments, 972/480-3432; Apple, 408/996-1010)