Alpha Processor, Inc.
Samsung In Volume MPU Bid
From Page One of Electronic News: June 22, 1998 Issue
By Gale Morrison
New York--Because the Alpha microprocessor line has been towed for so many years, it would be easy to discount the launch of Alpha Processor, Inc., a Samsung company, during PC Expo here last week. This would be a mistake.
_ John Rose, Compaq senior VP/group GM for Enterprise Systems, pledged that the as-yet-undetailed third product line will do for the Windows NT workstation market what the Cyrix MediaGX did for the sub-$1,000 PC market 18 months ago.
_ Samsung is very intent on replicating its DRAM success in microprocessors, especially now that it and Compaq have locked arms as customer and supplier. Daeje Chin, who led Samsung to its current 20 percent share of the world market, was handpicked by Samsung to be the chairman/CEO of Alpha Processor, Inc.
_ A San Jose, Calif., start-up known as Poseidon, Inc. will be producing Alpha core logic chipsets, including those for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems, for the merchant market. Given that Intel knocked several chipset vendors out of business in the last three years, entrants may be lining up.
_ Compaq, Microsoft and Intel are breaching some of their tight allegiances this year, by backing competitors of one another, a pronounced shift in the mainstream computer industry.
On Wednesday in New York, Mr. Chin introduced himself by saying, "You have known me as Mr. Memory, now you will know me as Mr. Microprocessor." He was Samsung Electronics' "hero in 16-megabit DRAMs," president/COO Yong Kag Lee said, because "he delivered working (16Mb) samples to key customers six months ahead of schedule." That perseverance--from a long bumpy start through the 1980s--has Samsung with 20 percent DRAM market share today and the assurance of 70 percent of output going to corporate accounts.
Mr. Lee said "Compaq is one our most important customers." The two have a broad relationship that covers DRAM, displays (for laptops and a booming flat desktop business), hard disk drives and now Alpha, he said. Mr. Chin on Wednesday added chipsets and cache SRAMs to that list, saying Samsung would be the one-stop shop for Compaq and anyone else. Mr. Lee said that "Compaq has seen already about a 75 percent decrease in Alpha pricing."
"Capacity is not an issue for Alpha . . . We have a big fab in Kiheung (Korea)" dedicated solely to Alpha, Young Joon (Y.J.) Kim, the Alpha Processor business director, said. Mr. Kim said that "in the next couple of months" Samsung would both reach volume in a 0.25-micron process and begin selling the next generation 21264, which is "clearly at least two years ahead (of Merced)." When the software development years are included, he said, "it's not just two years (ahead), it's seven." Mr. Lee said, "For Intel, it's OK that they are a couple of years behind (with a 64-bit microprocessor), for us, if we are behind, we are dead." He added that "Intel cannot match our performance."
Mr. Lee said Kiheung has eight production lines, five of which are 0.35-micron or lower, which Samsung paid about $1 billion each to equip. Samsung will soon have 700MHz, 0.25-micron Alphas, which means the company "accelerated the Alpha roadmap by about 18 months by doing the work outside of Digital."
And the Alpha manufacturing story does not end with Samsung. Negotiations continue with AMD and IBM to be Alpha sources as well. An AMD spokeswoman said Friday, "We're in final negotiations and things are going well. We're pretty confident that it will go to contract." IBM, on the other hand, said through a spokesman that Digital threw IBM's hat in the ring when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wanted to see alternative manufacturing sources, and he said that IBM is "considering it, like we would any other foundry relationship." IBM, should it agree to, would not be able to sell Alpha on the open market.
Mr. Kim and other Alpha Processor executives emphasized that Compaq intends to increase its R&D budget to bolster the Alpha engineering center in Massachusetts. It should be safe to say that these employees will be spared the 15,000 job cuts Compaq also intends company-wide.
Mr. Rose said last week that Compaq wants to make Alpha and Digital Unix open industry standards, and Mr. Borkowski emphasized, "That's not 'Alpha on Digital Unix,' that's Alpha and Digital Unix."
When this boosterism is coupled with Compaq's participation in the FTC's antitrust action against Intel, it would seem that Compaq truly wants to get out from under Intel, as has been seen with Compaq's embrace of other microprocessors for its sub-$1,000 PCs.
And still another crack in the 1990s computer industry armor--also known as the Wintel hegemony--showed last week. A day after Microsoft plugged Windows NT on Alpha in New York (and the company would not reveal until the last minute which Microsoft executive would show up in New York), Intel announced that it had forged a new relationship with Novell.
Novell is the Utah company whose NetWare operating system and GroupWise E-mail program Microsoft has gone after with Windows NT and Exchange, the platforms at the heart of Compaq's aspirations. Microsoft's competition with Novell is a quieter, very lucrative, older version of the Microsoft/Netscape market battle.
Novell and Intel have joined forces on a Java virtual machine (JVM) to run on a platform of the NetWare OS on the Intel architecture, which should show Microsoft how Intel feels about this Alpha endorsement. Some, including IBM and obviously Sun Microsystems, believe Java will release Microsoft's control of the software industry.
Microsoft in the end decided to send James Allchin, senior VP, Personal and Business Systems group to New York. He has led the company's network software strategy since 1990. Mr. Allchin, with his all-white hair and startled expression throughout, was quite kind to Alpha Microprocessor, Inc.
"We've been driving Alpha for Windows NT, and all the BackOffice applications, for a long time," Mr. Allchin said. Microsoft and Digital (Compaq) forged their formal "Alliance for Enterprise Computing" (AEC) for that purpose about three years ago. He led his remarks by saying that Microsoft is selling 200 copies of Windows NT Workstation per hour, and 100,000 copies of NT Server a month.
He said pointedly, "We will ship Windows NT 5.0 when it's ready (and he later declined to give a date). We're not going to wait for any processor," Mr. Allchin said, referring to questions of whether Microsoft's extended NT 5.0 timeframe corresponds to the Merced microprocessor timeline.
Adding manufacturers and capacity and enlisting other workstation vendors even appears to be Compaq's goal. "We're empowering the merchant semiconductor industry," Compaq's Mr. Rose declared on Wednesday. "Compaq would love to see all the OEMs adopting Alpha," Mr. Lee said, and he drew an analogy of Alpha standardization to the lead Compaq took in the Universal Serial Bus (USB) initiative.
Compaq will be coming out with Alpha-based, Compaq-branded workstations, ProLiant servers and a third unspecified product line in a matter of months. Mr. Rose said this third product line would be analagous to the category Compaq created, the sub-$1,000 PC. |
