Two relevant pieces below related to IDTI.....long but it appears long means summer of '99(?).
SemiBull
Good Timing Turns Bad For IDT MPU
By Robert Ristelhueber
Santa Clara, Calif.--The explosion of the sub-$1,000 personal computer
market this year should have been a windfall for Integrated Device Technology. The chipmaker introduced its line of inexpensive WinChip microprocessors last year aimed precisely at the emerging low-end PC market. Its timing and strategy seemed to have been perfect.
Instead, IDT finds itself scrambling to catch up, stuck with the wrong products at the wrong time. While rivals Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor have together managed to capture half the sub-$1,000 market from under Intel's nose, IDT's efforts have remained background noise in the $20 billion PC processor business.
Company officials admit they were caught off-guard by the aggressive
performance ramps of rival suppliers at the low end. "Our disappointment is we've not kept pace with the megahertz race," says Dave C“t‚, vice president of marketing. "It's something we need to get back on track with."
The fastest processor IDT is shipping in volume today runs at 240MHz. By contrast, National's Cyrix unit produces a MII chip running at 333MHz, AMD offers a 300MHz K6 part, and Intel recently introduced a Celeron processor at 330MHz.
That gap has put IDT at a big disadvantage. "The products IDT are offering are just not as attractive" as those being shipped by rivals, contends Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research in Scottsdale Ariz. The U.S. market is particularly speed-conscious, concedes IDT's Mr. C“t‚: "Americans want more power like they want muscle cars."
"We really don't see them much on the radar screen," says Steve Tobak, vice president of corporate marketing for National Semiconductor. "The only place we've run into IDT seems to be in China."
IDT's inability to produce competitive offerings can also be blamed on
execution problems. The company began sampling its next generation WinChip 2 and WinChip 2 3D parts four months ago, and hoped to be shipping in volume by now. But the decision to move all production from its San Jose fab to Hillsboro, Ore. has delayed volume production until November.
Even then, the bulk of the WinChip 2 parts will initially fall short of the 266Mhz speed seen as the entry point for the desktop market, C“t‚ admits. IDT doesn't expect to crack the 300MHz barrier until the first quarter of next year, when it plans to ship a device with a 128k level-one cache.
IDT is by far the smallest of the processor players, with only about 40 employees at its Austin, Tex.-based Centaur Technology subisidiary, where its MPUs are designed. Intel, and to a lesser degree National and AMD, can draw upon much greater resources to stay competitive.
IDT's announced strategy from the start was to focus on second- and third-tier markets, relying heavily on distributors. In the U.S., it is selling to PNY Technologies and Evergreen Technologies for the upgrade market, while Millennium Electronics is producing PCs through its NetRam Computers subsidiary priced at $499.
Overseas, IDT has landed Evesham as a customer in England, while Korea-based Trigem is marketing systems based on the IDT chip. The company suffered a setback recently, though, when Trigem was dropped as a supplier to the giant Costco chain of stores in this country.
Longer term, IDT harbors ambitions to join Cyrix and AMD as a supplier to top-tier PC companies such as Compaq and IBM. "It's still key to our success," Mr. C“t‚ says, adding that the company must first catch up in the speed wars.
It hopes to do that next year, when WinChip 3 is planned for introduction. Using a 12-stage pipeline, that device will be capable of running at 400 to 600MHz, according to Mr. C“t‚. IDT hopes to sample the part in the first half of 1999, with volume planned for this time next year.
The company had been counting on WinChip to help offset the wrenching slump in its other product lines, particularly static RAMs. IDT reported a $50 million net loss on revenues of $134.5 million in the quarter ended June 28, and earlier this month announced it would take a non-recurring charge of $205 million to $240 million during this quarter because of overcapacity.
But Mr. C“t‚ remains optimistic about the WinChip business, pointing out that IDT has only been selling the devices for less than a year. IDT shipped about 85,000 WinChips in the second calendar quarter this year, a figure that will rise to 200,000 during this quarter, Mr. C“t‚ said. "There's still a huge opportunity in the low-cost PC and network appliance markets," he asserts.
Tony Massamini, an analyst with Semico Research in Phoenix, says the low-end segment "is getting kind of crowded," resulting in low ASPs and poor margins. Other players besides IDT are getting into that space, including start-up Rise Technology, he adds.
Nevertheless, the desktop processor market is so huge that IDT can benefit greatly with only a tiny market share, Mr.Massamini says: "Just one half of one percent equals $100 million."
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Barrett Lays Out Intel's Battle Plan
By Peter Brown
Palm Springs, Calif.--Intel president Craig Barrett last week brushed aside the naysayers and laid out a long-term roadmap aimed at keeping his company the dominant microprocessor supplier well into the next millennium.
Although Intel this year has seen competitors make deep inroads into the low-end desktop market, and has been criticized as being ill-equipped to compete in markets outside the PC space, Dr. Barrett made it clear he was focused on the big picture. ''We see there being one billion computers in the world by 2005,'' he told the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and made it clear Intel was prepared to fight to be in every one of them.
Key to keeping its 85% MPU market share over the next couple years is the Katmai processor, aimed squarely at the mainstream PC space. Scheduled to begin production in the first half of 1999, Katmai will boast a performance of 450 to 500MHz, supported by the 2x AGP 440BX chipset, he claimed.
Katmai's performance will be helped by 70 new instructions per processor, AC-3 audio, and MPEG 2-enabled encode/decode integrated on the processor. Other specs include a 2 gigaFLOPS per second peak performance using a 128-bit SIMD architecture and 512 kilobits of BSRAM on-chip. It will be manufactured on a 0.25-micron process.
Dr. Barrett said Intel will follow that in the second half of next year with the Coppermine processors for both desktop and mobile computers. He gave few details, other than saying Coppermine would be built on a 0.18-micron process.
The Mobile Pentium II processor will get a speed boost to 333MHz in the first half of 1999 utilizing the 440BX chipset. In the sub-$1,000 space, where Intel has come under intense pressure from Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor, the company is planning to introduce a 366MHz Celeron processor in the first half of 1999, with unspecified upgrades later next year.
Intel will unveil StrongARM processors in the first half of next year for the set-top box and handheld PC market. The company has been a fringe player in this market, and is banking on the StrongARM 1100/1500 processor to jump-start its fortunes. Follow-on processors are slated for the second half of the year.
Over on the server/workstation side, Intel is planning on rolling out the follow-up to the Xeon, dubbed Tanner, in 1H99. Built on a 0.25-micron process, Tanner will feature a performance of 500MHz, L2 cache of 512K, while continuing to use the 450NX and 440GX chipsets. In 2H99, Intel will debut the Cascades processors for this space, based on the Katmai architecture and using a 0.18-micron process.
As far as its much-anticipated Merced chip goes, Dr. Barrett said the 64-bit line of processors are right on-track for an initial rollout in mid-2000. The company said the logic design has been completed, the circuit design and layout are currently being taped out and OEM platform designs are on-track for first samples in the near future.
Merced is aimed at enterprise servers and workstations.
In addition, the company has plans past the Merced for a chip called McKinley that is targeted for production sometime in 2H01. The McKinley chip is planned to double the performance of the Merced chip. Intel continues to promote the IA-64 architecture as having explicit parallelism, massive resources, predictabiity and speculation capability.
Demise overstated
Despite its troubles on the low end, Intel remains formidable, said Scott Hudson, analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group in San Jose, Calif. "With tremendous fab capacity, 85% market share (in microprocessors), and probably one of the biggest marketing muscles in the world, the company is going to survive. This is not to say there won't be tough times for the company, but everyone has tough times. They are and still will be the leader in PCs."
No Immediate Copper Plans
Although some major players like IBM and Motorola have detailed their copper metalization plans, Intel has kept a tight lid on its intentions. Dr. Barrett, however, said the company's move to copper may not be as quick as some of the others. Instead, it will concentrate on what it considers poor transistor performance.
The real bottleneck, he says, lies at the transistor level. "We will be as fast with our aluminum metalization and fast transistors as others will be with copper technology," Dr. Barrett said. Decreasing the gate delay that increases with each process geometry shrink is key, he noted. But he didn't rule out using copper in future process generations. |
