Of interest, if you've got a fridge: Intel Demos Chip at 1000MHz(fwd)

["Richard H. Fifarek" <rfifarek@som.siu.edu>]

Subject: Of interest, if you've got a fridge: Intel Demos Chip at 1000MHz


Intel Demos Chip Breaking Gigahertz Barrier                        02.26.99
===========================================================================

  San Francisco, CA -- As John Markoff reported for the NY Times, Intel
Corporation demonstrated a version of its new Pentium III microprocessor
that computes more than one billion operations a second, the one-gigahertz
mark.

  The chip giant was careful however, to state that it had

 super-cooled the chip
 ------------ --- ----

to reach the mark and that it did not expect to begin selling
commercial versions of the Pentium III running at that speed until the
end of 2000 or early 2001.

  "This is a technology demonstration," said Albert Yu, the Intel executive
in charge of microprocessor business. "It is not what I would recommend for
people to do in their homes."

  Other chip makers have designed experimental microprocessors that have
attained the one-gigahertz mark, but Yu said this was the first time that a
chip designed for general-purpose personal computers had reached it.

  Intel said that it was demonstrating the new microprocessor using its
0.25-micron manufacturing process, but that manufacture of the commercial
gigahertz processors would use an even more advanced process of either 0.18
or 0.13 micron.

  Intel has tried to position the Pentium III as a "next generation"
microprocessor, but industry analysts have generally viewed the chip as
merely an small advance over the company's 450-megahertz Pentium II chips.
The first Pentium III chips to be offered will operate at the speed of 500
megahertz.

  In recent years Intel has been closing in on producing the fastest reduced
instruction set computing, or RISC, chips that are used by workstation and
server manufacturers. But the features of the Pentium III that will
distinguish the chip's performance are instead oriented to broad consumer
markets.

  "If you are just running the same old software it doesn't do much for
you," said Linley Gwennap, an editor at Microprocessor Report, an industry
publication. "It's a little faster than the Pentium II 450."

  Gwennap said that the Pentium III had additional instructions that offered
faster processing of 3D graphics for games, speech recognition processing
and video compression.


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