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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mani1 who wrote (52920)	3/19/1999 6:49:00 AM
From: Jens M. Ottow	Respond to of 1574599

All Intel at the CeBIT: cebitnews.com Intel Launches Pentium III Xeon by Steve Homer Intel is launching its Pentium III Xeon at CeBIT in 500 and 550MHz models. The Xeon line is part of its policy of market segmentation, the company says that the computer market is now too big and diverse to be served by a single processor so sub families are needed, the PIII Xeon is designed for workstations and servers. The new processor is designed for the heavy duty workstation and server market and it is designed to allow up to eight processors to work together. In keeping with its new found Internet focus the PIII Xeon has the Streaming SIMD first seen at the original PIII launch. This will improve compression scheme and streaming functions such as voice recognition applications. But here Intel faces a typical technology discontinuity. These new instructions will work best when a PIII talks to a PIII, a tiny market for the moment. During his keynote, Intel President and General Manager Pat Gelsinger showed a truly impressive demonstration of a new compression scheme called NURBS. But this will only work effectively on PIII processors. What is more, consumers who want to use NURBS will have to download a plug-in, a procedure that users typically avoid. Streaming SIMD and other technology in the new processor will help servers produce better compression and more stable multiple streams. This will have direct results, albeit fairly slight, even for users connecting at 28.8Kbps. But the improved compression performance means that the faster connections, which are also becoming more common can be addressed. Other Internet bottlenecks, such as encryption algorithm processing, will be speeded up with the new processor. Intel is certainly trying to reinvent itself around the Internet. It failed to make itself a major video conferencing system provider with ProShare and it failed to make itself a significant software player when allegedly blocked by Microsoft. Now it seems to want to use its software skills more to sell its hardware than anything else. "Don't forget Intel has thousands of people working on software," said Gelsinger. "We have tens of thousands working on hardware but we still have thousands of people working on software. What we can do better than anyone on the planet is make our hardware sing and dance." This vision is producing results. For example late last year, Intel helped Real Networks deliver a new codec that significantly improved video performance on Intel-type PCs. The company now sees its software expertise as a lubricant that helps ease the use of its hardware, allowing the whole Intel machine to move smoothly forward. This will not stop the company pushing hard on making its chips ever more powerful. CeBIT News was the first ever publication to see Intel's new .18 micron technology. Intel will launch a mobile PII using .18 micron technology in Q2 1999 and will launch PIIIs which use the technology in the second half of this year. Intel can still attract controversy. It has caught a lot of flak for including the Processor Serial Number in its PIII design. This can be used to identify individual chips and civil liberty activists have worried over privacy issues. Recent events at the European Commission might have been expected to cause problems, but not so. "We have been talking to all the European data registrars," says Gelsinger wearily. "The recent turmoil will have no effect." Copyright © 1998 Global Marketing Solutions. Created with the assistance of PInG. Jens