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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joey Smith who wrote (76973)	3/22/1999 2:05:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Joey and Intel Investors - Pentium III/KNI support is SNOWBALLING. Check out this article from last weeks' Game Developer Conference in San Jose. "Riva TNT2 takes advantage of the Katmai instructions, particularly in the way they work with OpenGL, said Sanford Russell, director of product marketing. Transform and lighting functions have been tweaked to wring more from the CPU. It's a common strategy for putting Katmai to work: "Everybody in the industry's doing it because it's a no-brainer," Russell said. Paul {=============================} techweb.com March 22, 1999, Issue: 1053 Section: Semiconductors IBM releases Intellistation Z Pro workstation, Nvidia spins processor -- 3-D graphics vendors heed Katmai instructions Craig Matsumoto San Jose, Calif. - The combination of Intel's Pentium III Xeon launch and the Computer Game Developers' Conference last week spurred a handful of graphics-related an- nouncements, many of them tied to the Intel Katmai single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instruction set. Among them were IBM Corp.'s release of its latest workstation and Nvidia Corp.'s introduction of a processor with features tuned to exploit the Katmai set. Software vendors such as Autodesk are starting to leverage Katmai, said Mike Kerr, IBM's director of marketing for desktop products. "It takes some time for them to get the code out of the shop," Kerr said. Still, IBM and other vendors are already releasing graphics chips that they say are optimized for use with Katmai. IBM is aiming the new Intellistation Z Pro-the third offering in its line of Intellistation workstations-at the topmost rung of the market. The machine runs on the Pentium III Xeon processor (its predecessors used the plain Pentium III). The minitower is upgradable to a dual-processor configuration and can hold up to 2 Gbytes of memory, compared with 1 Gbyte for earlier Intellistation minitowers. Depending on the application being run, the Katmai instructions produce a 5 percent to 20 percent boost in graphics performance on the Z Pro, Kerr said. But the machine's primary selling points are expected to be its larger memory capacity and dual-processor capability. The use of Xeon will speed "applications where you hit the cache hard" because of its larger memory cache, Kerr said. High-end appeal "In the EDA marketplace, the Z Pro will appeal to people doing the higher-end application work-people with large memory requirements," he said. IBM offers two options for workstation 3-D graphics: its own Fire GL1 and the Intense 3D Wildcat 4000, developed by Intergraph Corp. The Fire GL1 is a single-chip, 256-bit-wide graphics accelerator that has drivers written for the Katmai SIMD instruction set. IBM is working with board maker Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. to bring the part to the larger market for use by other workstation vendors. Kerr said IBM "saw a really nice benefit on performance . . . that's directly attributable" to the Fire GL1's use of Katmai's SIMD instructions. He said the part is a good fit for applications mixing 2-D and 3-D graphics processing, "because the 2-D performance in this is pretty close to, if not the same as, [what] you get on a Matrox card." The Intergraph part, on the other hand, is intended for more-complicated graphics. "If you're working with very large models or multiple light sources or lots of texturing, you'll see very good performance scale up with the Intergraph chip," whereas the GL1's performance tails off, Kerr said. Nvidia's latest processor, the Riva TNT2, was also designed with the Katmai instruction set in mind. The chip can process 2 pixels per clock cycle and can support frame buffers as large as 32 Mbytes. The chip also supports the AGP 4X bus. Riva TNT2 takes advantage of the Katmai instructions, particularly in the way they work with OpenGL, said Sanford Russell, director of product marketing. Transform and lighting functions have been tweaked to wring more from the CPU. It's a common strategy for putting Katmai to work: "Everybody in the industry's doing it because it's a no-brainer," Russell said. Copyright (c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.