Intel pushes Pentium speed to 166MHz

Electronic News, Jan 8, 1996 by Jim DeTar

Santa Clara, Calif.--Intel late last week unveiled 150MHz and 166MHz versions of its Pentium microprocessor, priced at $547 and $749 respectively in PGA packages in quantities of 1,000. This is a significantly lower price than previous Pentiums at introduction, such as the 120MHz and 133MHz versions, both priced at $935 for their respective introductions last year (EN, March 27, June 12 1995).

Frank Spindler, Intel's marketing manager for the Pentium processor division, said in an interview that the company's continuing manufacturing capacity expansion was a primary enabler of the lower initial price. "What enabled this is our ramp of 0.35-micron (process technology), product health and capacity currently in place." Mr. Spindler said Intel plans to ramp these versions faster than previous ones, paralleling its overall strategy for the Pentium. Intel brought the Pentium to high volume production faster than any of its previous x86 generations.

"Another thing that will fuel this quick ramp is that these processors are designed to fit into the same pinout established by OEMs. In many cases they will be able to offer systems based on these parts with little modification of their R&D design." The company expects the 150/166MHz versions to be available in mid-range systems priced up to $2,500 by the end of 1H96, with 133MHz Pentiums in the lower mid-range $2,000 systems and $120/100MHz versions in entry-level systems priced up to $1,800.

Intel has also been striving to shorten the time between introduction of a processor for the desktop and a smaller, more power-efficient version for the mobile market. Although he declined to state a target date for introduction of mobile versions of the 150/166MHz Pentiums, Mr. Spindler confirmed the company's commitment to driving Pentium into the mobile sector. "We intend to offer higher performance. I think in general you will see the trend of more Pentiums in mobile systems." Currently, Intel's highest speed MPU for mobile applications is the 120MHz Pentium.

G. Carl Everett, Intel's senior vice president, Desktop Products Group, indicated that the new chips, which will be built on Intel's 3.3-volt, 0.35-micron manufacturing process, will not compete with the company's recently-introduced Pentium Pro, which is just beginning to ramp. Mr. Everett said that while the Pentium Pro will be offered in workstations, high-end desktops and servers, fast Pentium processor-based systems will remain a choice for mainstream business and home computing.

The Pentium family now extends from 60MHz to 166MHz. The devices feature superscalar architecture, enhanced floating point unit (FPU), 64-bit data bus, branch prediction, separate code and data caches with MESI protocol, performance monitoring and execution tracing and error detection capabilities.

In terms of performance, Intel said the 166MHz Pentium achieved a rating of 4.76 on the recently-introduced SPECint95 integer performance benchmark suite, while the 150MHz Pentium was rated at 4.27. For math-intensive applications, the 166MHz device is specified at 3.37 SPECfp95 (floating point), while the 150MHz Pentium is rated at 3.04 SPECint95, Intel said. The company tested its new devices in Xtended Xpress desktop systems equipped with 16-kilobytes of primary cache and 1-megabyte of secondary cache.

Mr. Spindler said the higher speed Pentiums began shipping toward the end of last year. "We started production shipments in the fourth quarter of 1995. We have been in volume shipments for a good period of time and this early availability will help get systems to users in the retail channel."

Intel simultaneously announced a list of systems vendors committed to the 150- and 166MHz versions including Acer, ALR, AST, Canon, Compaq, Corollary, Dell, Digital Equipment Corp., Everex, Gateway 2000, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and NEC. In all, Intel said about 70 companies are committed to the higher speed Pentiums. These systems are immediately available from a variety of retailers, including CompUSA, Office Depot and Tandy Corp.

Separately, Intel said it plans to announce new quarterly pricing for many of its x86 microprocessors on Feb. 1.