The fears of Intel's Grove

Electronic News, Nov 25, 1996 by Jim DeTar

Las Vegas--Intel president and CEO Andrew S. Grove said in a keynote address at the Fall Comdex conference here that his greatest fear is not from microprocessor competitors but rather that "New users fuel the speculative cycle for development. My fear is the users won't come and the whole cycle will spin backward or stop."

However, announcements by competitors at Comdex--including a broadening of the IBM/Motorola/Apple PowerPC platform alliance--are designed to change the shape of Mr. Grove's fears in the months and years ahead.

While the PC industry was getting better acquainted with Microsoft's Windows CE operating system for portable computing systems (see related story, page 1) and getting a first look at Pentium Pro multiprocessor systems with up to eight processors inside, the PowerPC community was providing behind-the-scenes looks at future products, such as a dual-processor 300MHz PowerPC 604 system.

Developments in the PowerPC pavilion included the debut of a reference design called Yellowknife, the announcement by IBM that it has licensed the Macintosh operating system to Tatung--bringing the total number of IBM Macintosh OS licensees to two and the industry total around a dozen now--and the demonstration of the recently-introduced 240MHz PowerPC in the PowerPC pavilion next to a yet-to-be-announced 300MHz version PowerPC.

The Yellowknife PowerPC Platform Reference Design continues the consortium's common reference strategy enunciated at last year's Comdex as the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP for short (EN, Nov. 20, 1995). CHRP has itself since been changed to "the PowerPC Platform" specification. Yellowknife is compatible with the specification and is capable of booting Macintosh OS, Windows NT and other operating systems.

Alaris Corp. will manufacture and distribute evaluation systems based on Yellowknife. And UMAX Computer Corp. intends to use the Yellowknife reference design to build the company's first PowerPC Platform systems, expected in early 1997. "The performance capabilities of Yellowknife give UMAX the room it needs to design low-cost, multi-OS computers that combine robust features with the natural advantages of the PowerPC microprocessor."

Exponential Technology--which has designs on the title of PowerPC performance leader--demonstrated a 350MHz version of its PowerPC-compatible architecture, dubbed the Exponential X 9500. By mid-1997, according to Exponential, PC OEMs will be able to offer 350MHz and 533MHz systems.

And, describing the 300MHz prototype PowerPC developed on a Somerset design that IBM demonstrated in a dual-processor system at Comdex, Louis Capps, systems engineer for IBM's RS6000 Client Workstation group, said: "We've really seen performance increases for dual-processor systems. We're able to do some of the 3-D rendering off of one processor and do some of the overhead on the first processor. In particular, PowerPC has been great for us in workstations because everybody's just learning now that floating point is very important for 3-D.

"Now a lot of gamers have determined 'We need this floating point performance,' and on the web site you will see benchmarks on all the processors. We've got 16 general-purpose registers, eight of them are floating point. That's very important; it takes several registers to do 3-D operations," Mr. Capps added.

Over in the x86 camp, Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated for the first time working silicon for its long-discussed AMD-K6 microprocessor. The device ran Office Suite on the Windows NT platform, along with Excel, Word and some video files. As previously reported, AMD recently began sampling the K6 to key customers earlier this month (EN, Nov. 18).

At Comdex, AMD also revealed it will begin sampling a 166MHz version of its existing K5 MPU family as early as the end of December, with volume production for that chip planned for 1Q97. In terms of performance, the K5-166 is estimated to have a Winstone '96 rating of 82.9, compared to a Winstone '96 rating of 82.7 for the Pentium, according to AMD.

Dana Krelle, director of marketing for AMD's California Microprocessor division, admitted it has been an arduous struggle to get the company's x86 program off the ground.

"After a long, difficult start, we're finally getting some really good traction in terms of getting into the range of the marketplace that we've always wanted to play in. We're in volume production now at all levels from 150MHz on down with the K5, and we expect the 166MHz K5 to be in volume production in the first quarter. Finally, on the fifth generation, we're in a space where we think it'll have a nice, long life, because it's in a range in the marketplace that we think will survive for quite a while.

"On the K6, the product is on its A-stepping of the silicon. It's in quite good shape. We're a lot of the way through our very robust validation and compatibility testing. We've successfully run all the 64-bit operating systems that are part of that testing. We do believe we're absolutely on track with the strategy of commencing production in Q1 of next year. We have already sampled some of the development partners and BIOS partners so the infrastructure can be ready."