Article...Intel unveils plans for 1999 and new millennium...
November 18, 1998
InfoWorld Electric : SAN FRANCISCO -- It was show-and-tell time here last week as Intel executives presented a company road map of products and initiatives for the coming year to financial analysts who follow the high-tech industry.
After a few brief comments from Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett, in which he alluded to how the chip giant had out-performed industry expectations, Barrett turned the stage over to the various heads of departments who laid out where the company is headed next year.
Sean Maloney, vice president of sales and marketing, told the audience that the OEM inventory problems in the first half of 1998 were like a "boat anchor " holding back sales and progress but that Intel was now running " flat out" to keep up with demand for its Pentium II processors.
Sounding more like a green grocer than a technologist, Maloney said that with the lowest inventory levels ever, "the freshest products are out in the channel."
Maloney credited Intel's Web-based Supply Line Management Program, now being used by 11 major system OEMs, for playing a part in the industrywide reduction in inventory.
Maloney went on to tick off growth areas for Intel, which included networking products for small business, Intel-based Internet servers for ISPs, and its growing Internet-commerce business. The company is currently booking $1 billion per month with 200 customers in 30 countries, Maloney said.
With a candid reference to Intel's first-generation Celeron desktop chip as a "clunker," Intel's Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, was next up.
In 1999 low-cost desktops and notebooks will be driven by faster Celeron processors, with a 400-MHz desktop version appearing in the first half of 1999 and both a 266-MHz and 300-MHz Celeron version for mobiles appearing at the same time, Otelllini said.
However, the most significant news from Otellini's talk was about a new Intel initiative called Transition Management.
"As Intel moves its processor and chip set architecture, it requires a qualification cycle that is lengthy and costly and IS managers would rather not deal with it, but they still want to take advantage of Moore's Law," Otellini said.
According to Otellini, Intel will be working on developing "simplified platform road maps," so IT managers can bring in new processors without having to do a major re-qualification.
Otellini also told the audience to watch next January's Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas to see how the PC industry will introduce new form factors as a result of the Apple iMac success.
"There is a great deal of design activity around high-quality LCD screens, combined with mobile technology and small-form-factor machines.
Otellini also said that 0.18-micron processors will appear in notebooks products first by the third quarter of 1999. The so-called processor shrink, which reduces the width of the interconnecting wires, allows chips to consume less power and run cooler with faster performance. This will mean mobile systems will achieve performance parity with desktops, according to Otellini.
On the server side, Intel will continue to develop IA-32 architecture to follow the Xeon with faster 32-bit processors, code-named Tanner, Cascades, and Foster.
Systems using the 0.25-micron architecture will go above 500 MHz in the first half of 1999 and above 600-MHz performance as the company transitions to 0.18 technology later in the year.
IT managers will see 1,000-MHz or 1-GHz chip performance in the first half of 2000 on IA-64 platforms, with Merced followed by McKinley and Madison. On the road map as well was a 64-bit chip called Deerfield, which appears to be the server processor equivalent of Celeron on the desktop.
System bus performance will transition from 100 MHz to 133 MHz by the third quarter of 1999, he said, while workstations will get some special attention with a new graphics bus called AGP Pro, designed to accommodate very high-end graphics cards.
An Intel slide laid out for the audience what a typical workstation would look like by the third quarter of 1999. It will feature:
<li>AGP 4X, AGP Pro;
<li>a Carmel chip set;
<li>a PCI-64-bit 66-MHz bus;
<li>direct Rambus DRAM;
<li>4GB of memory; and
<li>a 133-MHz system bus
Pat Gelsinger, vice president and general manager of the Desktop Products Group, took the stage next and talked about a number of key Intel initiatives going forward. Among those initiatives were the following.
<li>Intel will promote a standard hardware definition for use of Linux at its developer forum.
<li>Intel will focus on its next-generation I/O architecture.
<li>Intel will promote "instant on" with a maximum 6-second wait before system awakens from a "deep sleep" mode.
The four-hour session ended with Andy Bryant, chief financial officer, who reviewed product engineering, inventory control, and capital spending containment.
Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., is at www.intel.com.
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dmf, as the shorts run for cover, the long term investor simply takes note of a small blip in the relentless climb of one of the great companies on planet earth! :-)
techstocks.com
Michael
p.s. It's nice to smile and post this on my new 300MHZ laptop!!
Yeeehaaaw!
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