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Technology Stocks : CYRIX / NSM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (29918)	10/15/1998 1:41:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 33344

Published Thursday, October 8, 1998, in the San Jose Mercury News mercurycenter.com Chips: next generation Big Three: Intel, AMD, Cyrix to offer divergent designs at forum next week. BY TOM QUINLAN Mercury News Staff Writer The Big Three of microprocessors intend to outline their 1999 product plans at the Microprocessor Forum next week. Combined, the announcements underscore an increasingly fragmented future for personal computer designs. Although Intel Corp.'s microprocessor core continues to be the common link between Intel's new Katmai processors, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD-K7 and Cyrix Corp.'s new Jalapeno chip design, next year could mark the first time that the differences between competing microprocessors are more important than the similarities. Each company is increasingly modifying its chip designs to go after new markets, to add new features or both. The biggest departure from Intel's basic chip architecture will be Cyrix's Jalapeno microprocessor core that will carry the concept of system-on-a-chip to new levels, sources familiar with the chip's design said. Cyrix is expected to promote that basic design for use in a wide variety of products, ranging from extremely low-cost PCs to Internet devices, cable TV set-top boxes, and hand-held communications devices -- virtually anything digital. Besides the x86 instruction set, chips built using Jalapeno will also include a wide range of features once handled by separate components, including a 3-D graphics processor, high-speed modem, the hardware and software needed to play back video, and even support for audio data. Theoretically, a device based on the chip -- which will be broadly known as the M3 -- could let a user surf the Internet while playing a Digital Video Disc movie at the same time. Most significant, the M3 chip will include the ability to manage devices like printers, keyboards and even video cameras directly. Also, a new chip design will let the processor handle data from different sources simultaneously, something x86 chips don't do. ''It's going to be a hell of a chip for handling communications,'' said Rob Enderle, a senior industry analyst for the market research firm Giga Information Systems in San Jose. ''It's one of the primary reasons why I predict that PCs costing less than $500 will be a viable market within two years.'' Cyrix and its parent company, National Semiconductor Corp., have been developing system-on-a-chip designs for the past two years and will introduce two chips next year based on technology that predates Jalapeno but still share some of the same design features. But it will be the combination of speed, features and low cost that give Jalapeno a reasonable chance of kick-starting the still embryonic intelligent information appliances market, observers said. ''By putting (the controllers) directly onto the chip, Cyrix can develop a cheap system that provides users with the same overall performance they can get from faster processors from other manufacturers,'' said Richard Doherty, founder of the market research firm Envisioneering Inc., in Seaford, N.Y. Potentially that will reduce the cost of a PC by eliminating several relatively expensive components needed now to connect peripherals to the PC and to move data from one part of the computer to another. Chips based on the Jalapeno design aren't expected to ship until the end of 1999 at the earliest. Joe