IP: Intel's Plan B chip stirs internal debate

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Intel's Plan B chip stirs internal debate
BY THERESE POLETTI
Mercury News

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/intel012502.htm

AUTO-Abstract

Tucked 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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