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IP: Intel's Plan B chip stirs internal debate
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 09:20:23 -0500
Intel's Plan B chip stirs internal debate BY THERESE POLETTI Mercury News http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/intel012502.htm AUTO-AbstractTucked away in Hillsboro, Ore., a small team of Intel engineers has been quietly working on a chip technology that the giant semiconductor maker hopes will never see the light of day.
Intel's Yamhill Technology is a secret weapon against upcoming chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices.
It's also a hedge against the possible failure of Intel's flashy new Itanium chips for computer servers, which have so far gotten a disappointing reception from customers and partners.
Unlike the Itanium, which uses a novel design that has some difficulty running software written for Intel's well-known Pentium family of chips, new chips with the Yamhill feature could easily handle the older programs as well as more sophisticated, memory-intensive games, database programs and scientific applications.
Some Intel executives believe the Yamhill Technology's existence will be seen as a tacit admission that the Itanium, which took an estimated $1 billion and seven years to develop, might be a flop.
The Yamhill features are being built into the next version of Intel's Pentium chip, code-named Prescott, with an option to turn the features on or off.
At stake are billions of dollars a year in sales of the high-speed chips that serve as the brains for computer servers, a market which Intel and AMD have both targeted for future growth as personal computer sales flatten.
The extra features, called extensions, will make the Prescott chip a 64-bit chip compatible with Intel's traditional x86 designs, like AMD's Hammer, in case that's what customers really want.
In the past, it had based its entire x86 chip family on a design that used Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) principles, which process instructions one at a time.
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