Intel Shows 1-GHz Chip, But It's Not For Sale Yet

( 2/24/99; 3:00 PM EST)
By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Intel demonstrated a Pentium II Tuesday running above 1 GHz on the first day of its forum here for PC manufacturers and developers.

Intel executives did not say whether the Pentium II family will eventually scale to that speed, but the chip serves to demonstrate the pace of Intel's developments.

Also at the Intel Developers Forum, company executives confirmed the Intel 820 chip set has been delayed. Without specifically commenting on the chip set itself, Pat Gelsinger, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Products Group, said next-generation chip sets supporting Direct Rambus and the ATA-66 storage interface -- both features of the Intel 820 -- would be launched in the third quarter. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel has apparently scotched or sacrified a version of the chip set, scheduled to be launched in June, that would support 600-MHz Direct RDRAM.

As Intel charted an aggressive road map moving into the next millennium, executives said they were satisfied with the progress of the PC, but outlined a renewed drive to continue expanding its reach. Paul Otellini, executive vice president of Intel's Architecture Business Group, said worldwide sales of PCs exceeded the sales of televisions in 1998, and that users sent more e-mail messages than first-class mail in that period.

Otellini cited market figures showing PCs selling above $2,000 declined from a 40 percent market share in the late 1980s to under 10 percent last year, and said this justifies Intel's continued push to reduce the PC's manufacturing cost.

"But we still haven't found the recipe for continued significant growth," Otellini said.

In 1999, the main ingredient in that recipe will be Intel's Pentium III, scheduled to be launched at the end of this month. Backing up independent online testing agencies, Intel claimed significant increases in system performance in tests conducted upon Pentium III systems, compared with those using Pentium II processors at the same clock speeds. In speech recognition, photo editing, and video-creation software applications, Intel claimed performance enhancements of 37 percent, 64 percent, and 20 percent, respectively.

Promising to add fuel to the current controversy about the Pentium III's security feature, a German publication reported Tuesday that it had cracked the serial identification feature built into the Pentium III, letting a website or a malicious third party identify the PC and, potentially, the user.

Despite the objection of activists, Intel will continue to develop the Pentium III with an ID feature. The clock speed of the Pentium II will exceed 600 MHz by the end of the year, and will be complemented by a 500-MHz Celeron, according to Gelsinger.

For mobile PCs, the Intel mobile Pentium II will exceed 600 MHz, complimented by a 400-MHz Celeron chip.

In 2000, Intel will unveil its Geyserville technology, letting processors run at higher speeds when plugged into a docking station. Finally, in servers and workstations, Intel's Xeon will break the 600-MHz barrier.

Aside from mentioning the delay in the Intel 820, Intel disclosed no new information concerning its chip sets, but it mentioned the 440MX chip set for mobile PCs. The features of the 440MX were unknown at publishing deadline time.

Gelsinger's glimpse of Intel's future technology initiatives also offered few surprises. Intel's forthcoming 64-bit chip, Merced, is still on track to sample by the middle of this year; the chip is in the final stages of "verification," or testing. Six separate operating systems have already been successfully tested on Merced.

As a complement to Intel's Next-Generation I/O interface, Gelsinger briefly described a future storage interface, Future ATA. In the second half of 2000, the ATA storage interface will be made narrower, with faster performance, Gelsinger said. The idea is to craft a more cost-effective solution that can still scale to faster speeds.

Future ATA will be designed to replace ATA-66, which is included in the delayed 820 chip set and will exist until about 2005, he said.

Finally, Intel expressed concerns that Apple's iMac would overshadow the PC in creating radical new chassis designs. "The PC has become a dump truck of technology, and we have to work together to produce a consumer appliance," said Gelsinger.

© 1998 CMP Media, Inc.