Intel has a raft of new processors on the way, but there are
serious challenges to the company’s market share on all
fronts
Not so long ago, choosing what type of processor you wanted for
your new system or upgrade was easy. In fact, the choices were
fairly limited and most discerning shoppers opted for an Intel
chip. Through its technological advantage, Intel created a dominant
position in the market with its Pentium processors and had most of
the major PC manufacturers tied into exclusive contracts. But
Intel's crown is starting to slip, and the company could soon be
faced with serious competition in all sectors of the PC
marketplace. But the question remains: will buyers want to risk
moving away from Intel for the chance of improved performance at a
lower price?
With the emergence of the value PC market, Intel seemed to take its
eye off the ball, letting competitors gain a significant foothold.
AMD emerged with its K-series as a good value alternative to
Intel's more expensive Pentium processors. Intel tried to counter
with its low-end Celeron range of chips, but serious problems with
the first generation of these processors allowed AMD to grab a
significant chunk of the consumer PC market. The problems with the
Celeron have since been sorted out but the damage was already done,
and in the US AMD accounted for more high street sales of PCs than
those with Intel inside. AMD's introduction of the higher
performance Athlon chip last year further boosted its consumer
presence, but so far it has had great difficulty breaking Intel's
stranglehold in the business desktop and server marketplace. This
could soon change as AMD produces a product roadmap to challenge
Intel's core business. But it is not only AMD that Intel has to
worry about. Other challengers, such as Transmeta, are entering the
arena, a situation that could threaten Intel's mobile processor
market share.Of course, Intel is not resting on its laurels, and
most of the developments that have been reported by Intel's
competitors are in response to work already underway by the chip
behemoth. Plans are afoot to regain significant ground in the value
PC market segment. Code-named Timna, Intel's forthcoming low-end
chip is designed as a natural replacement for the Celeron and will
integrate the CPU, memory and graphics controller onto one chip.
The integration of this so-called "system on a chip" should mean
much lower manufacturing costs and therefore a lower price to the
consumer. Reports have suggested that systems using the Timna chip
could cost as little as $600, with the chip itself coming in at
only $69.Original plans were to release Timna later this year, but
technical problems have held this back. A flaw causing
system-freeze in the Memory Translator Hub, a component of Timna,
is believed to be at the root of the delay. A similar problem
caused the recall of one million Pentium III motherboards in May.
The release of Timna is now expected in the first quarter of 2001.
A successor to Timna, called the Timna+, is also on the product
roadmap, but details of this are still sketchy.The second half of
this year will see the introduction of a new chip however.
Currently named Willamette, the chip is an update to Intel's
current 32-bit offering. The chips will be introduced at speeds of
well over 1GHz and will feature a number of performance-enhancing
features. Firstly, a new hyper-pipelined design will enable
instructions inside the chip to be queued and executed at a much
faster rate, thus increasing the overall clock speed. A set of 144
new instructions will also be introduced which enhances performance
to accelerate video and encryption, and support forthcoming
Internet applications. Willamette will also use a 400MHz system
bus, which, according to Intel, is the first in the industry. The
bus will transfer information from the processor to the rest of the
system at speeds three times faster than current PIII
processors.Intel, however, may have trouble convincing motherboard
and PC manufacturers to adopt the initial Willamette chip as it
appears to have a very limited lifespan. From release in the fourth
quarter of 2000, it is expected that a new motherboard chipset,
named Tulloch, will be introduced in the second quarter of the
following year, initially for Willamette, but it will pave the way
for the Northwood processor in the second half of 2001. Northwood
is expected to be a 0.13 micron processor, and Willamette is
believed to be just a stepping stone on the way to the Northwood
release.More significant is the forthcoming introduction of Intel's
64-bit processing architecture in the form of Itanium, formerly
code-named Merced. This practically creates a new high-end category
of its own and is aimed at e-business. Obviously, speed will be
improved due to its ability to execute more instructions
simultaneously and the much larger memory gives greater room to
store, deliver and mine data. Availability has also been a key
issue with Itanium - especially due to the constant nature of the
Internet - and Intel expects the uptime of its 64-bit chip to be
exceptional. Expect to see Itanium chips appearing towards the end
of this year.One downside to Itanium is that due to the change of
architecture, it will be less effective in running current 32-bit
software applications. In fact, the processor is believed to run
slower than current Pentium III chips when executing 32-bit
software instructions. Intel seems unduly concerned by this,
claiming that most 32-bit software can be recompiled as a 64-bit
program. Also, Intel believes most customers who adopt Itanium will
be looking to 64-bit software rather than porting old applications
onto a new system.AMD has taken this as an opportunity to enter the
64-bit market. Not best known for its development at the high-end,
AMD believe that by offering a 64-bit computing solution that is
truly backwards compatible with 32-bit software, it will offer an
easier migration path to users wishing to install the new chips.
Sledgehammer, AMD's alternative to Itanium, has been designed to do
exactly that. It will incorporate current x86 32-bit computing at
similar speeds to its 64-bit operation.Nathan Brookwood, principal
analyst at Insight 64, said: "Time and again, processor architects
have looked at the inelegant x86 architecture and declared it
cannot be stretched to accommodate the latest innovations. Time and
again, a clever designer has proven them wrong. It seems truly
ironic that Intel, the inventor of x86 architecture, has bet its
64-bit future on a radical new design, while the upstart AMD
proposes a more conservative and computable path. If AMD's approach
pans out, customers will benefit from a wider array of choices for
their high-end systems. Perhaps when architects in 2025 begin to
debate the move to 128-bit computing, they won't be so quick to
reject extensions to the x86-64 features AMD has laid out."AMD's
main problem with Sledgehammer is that it isn't due for release
until the end of 2001. By that time Intel will have moved onto its
second generation of 64-bit processors, code-named McKinley.But
Sledgehammer isn't the only plan that AMD have in store for the
next year or so. The success of the Athlon, partly down to AMD's
ability to get the chips out while Intel has struggled to ship its
PIII Coppermine processors out of the factory fast enough, has
convinced AMD that it can go after Intel's core market as well as
the value PC market.Athlon recently beat the Pentium III to reach
the landmark 1GHz processing speed and AMD now wants to utilise the
Athlon to break into the mainstream market in a major way.
Recently, it announced a new version of the Athlon chip, codenamed
Thunderbird. The new chip, available initially in six speeds from
750MHz to 1GHz, features a much larger on-chip L2 cache of 256KB,
increasing performance by holding large amounts of relevant data
closer to the processor. These chips will also be the first to use
0.18 micron copper technology as opposed to aluminium. With these
and several other performance improvements, AMD hopes it can raise
a serious challenge to Intel in the mainstream market, and has
already got several manufacturers to include Thunderbird in their
systems, including Compaq, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gateway, HP and
IBM.Later on in the year we should see further developments to the
Athlon processor. Scheduled for release during the second half of
this year, Mustang will have a much reduced core size, requiring
less power and around 1Mb of L2 cache. Alongside this will be
Corvette, which is to be developed specifically for the mobile
market.Of course, AMD is not ignoring its stronghold of the value
PC market and has just started shipping its Duron processor, a
scaled down version of the Athlon, to compete with Intel's Celeron.
This will initially be available in speeds of 700, 650 and
600MHz.Intel not only faces a challenge from AMD, but new company
Transmeta looks set to steal a significant proportion of business
in the mobile sector. Transmeta's main selling point is that the
processor needs much less power than currently available
processors, meaning extended battery life for mobile devices. While
the company is still in its early stages, it is expected to make
some major announcements with computer manufacturers soon.While
Intel still dominates a large part of the processor market, it
looks set to face some major challenges in the near future, and
while this may not be good for Intel in the short term, it should
be good for the market as a whole. At least, it should certainly
benefit the consumer, with prices continuing to drop while
performance and choice increase.
Paul Grant