Jerome, and Brian,
Could INTC be exploring other uses of the Pentium III?
Other uses right now, which one could call PCs also, I admit, but just bigger ones, are workstations and servers. The number that is being kicked around of 7.8% Pentium III is just retail, from stores like Fry's and Circuit City. Workstations, for CAE, CAD and other kinds of graphics, or simulation intensive, or other engineering design, could be sold by Dell, Gateway, Micron etc. via the internet. Actually, the best and award winning one is from SGI, who is going all Intel (except old Cray). These applications are above and beyond the 7.8% number. Also, PIII is highly used for corporate, who rarely buy at retail. These workstations would be single or dual processor. For servers, for NT, Unix or Linux, people usually select Pentium III Xeons, which are different mostly because they have an extra large L2 cache, as big as 2 megabytes, making the chips good for transaction processing, internet servers, database crunching, data warehousing, etc. Xeon servers can be single up through quad, all on the same motherboard. 8-way is coming soon. Again, some call the workstations and servers "just big PCs", so, other than these, I don't know of other intentions for the PIII by Intel.
Other microprocessors Intel is pushing for "appliances" and other apps are the Strongarm, which they got from DEC in the settlement. It's a little guy, and goes up to 450 or so MHz at just half a watt. The power must, of course, be very low for appliances. They got another chip from DEC called the SA1110. I don't know much about it except it's something like Strongarm. A future chip is code named Timna, which will be an integrated x86 CPU - supposedly a one-chip version with CPU, Chip sets & graphics on one piece of silicon. It will basically be a low power PC on a chip, eliminating about everything inside a PC except hard drive, DRAM and motherboard. Mention one more device coming from Intel, they are designing a "network processor", kind of like a general purpose processor for routers, switches and bridges that run the LANs, MANs and WANs of the world. Kind of like the Pentium of the network world (Intel hopes), to replace a whole bunch of different custom ASICs. Big, big selling job ahead of Intel on this one.
Rambling on here, but I don't think it's crucial to Intel that they make the PIII, by itself, extremely pervasive (of course, they'd love to). It's core has been used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Celeron, so it has gone a long, long way in that respect. Many of the new applications, for appliances and networks require, much lower power, so Intel is doing the chips above that fit specifically better in that regard.
Tony |
