Intel top dog at chip meet, PPC in wings
San Jose, Calif. - Intel Corp. took the spotlight here at MicroDesign Resources' Microprocessor Forum conference last week. A crowd of more than 1,200 engineers compared notes on progress in chips for workstation, desktop and embedded applications.
Although they didn't announce any new PowerPC technology, representatives from IBM Microelectronics Division and Motorola RISC Microprocessor Division fended off rumors flying over their jointly run Somerset Design Center in Austin, Texas.
Intel took the wraps off Merced, the code name for its first IA-64 processor, due in 1999. The 0.18-micron, 64-bit chip will use Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) technology, a new architecture that has piqued the interest of many workstation vendors, including Apple.
John Crawford, Intel director of microprocessor architecture, said EPIC can provide more than four times the performance of RISC-based processors. The optimizations require compilers to bring out parallel structures in code.
"This is not like our previous transitions," said Fred Pollack, Intel director of processor planning. The forthcoming IA-64 chips will be aimed at servers, while the current IA-32 (P6, or Pentium) processors will continue in mobile and desktop systems past 2003. He said an IA-64 chip with performance two times better than Merced's is slated for 2001.
"Steve Jobs has made [IA-64] clear as a direction for Rhapsody," said attendee Peter Mehring, general manager and vice president of R&D for UMAX Computer Corp. of Fremont, Calif. "I'm here getting educated on it."
A panel of RISC developers, including Digital Equipment Corp., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc., countered Intel's EPIC claims and said similar coding techniques could be managed with today's workstations.
Meanwhile, the PowerPC partners were mum on developments. While analysts said the PowerPC was strong in many performance metrics, they predicted the alliance would soon collapse and halt further work on desktop processors.
"These are just rumors," countered Motorola's Mark McDermott, director of the Somerset Design Center. He said the companies will continue building desktop processors as well as embedded versions. The next round of PowerPC processors, called G4, is "absolutely on track," McDermott said. The evolutionary design will comprise "more optimizations of a powerful core."