| August 21, 1998 |
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August 20, 1998
Semiconductor Business News
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Shares in both Intel and Texas
Instruments are down, after being downgraded by Merrill
Lynch analyst Tom Kurlak Thursday. After Wednesday's
earnings warning from National Semiconductor, the action
suggests recent optimism about the near future for the
semiconductor industry must be tempered by the continuing
poor conditions for the industry. The analyst
downgraded his rating for Intel [INTC] to near-term
neutral, from its previous rating of accumulate. Intel
(company profile) shares were trading heavily, and the
midday price of 86 13/16 was down nearly $3 from
Wednesday's closing price.
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By Michael Kanellos
August 20, 1998
C/Net
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Intel will make a major push into the
low-cost computing arena Monday by releasing the first
Celeron processors with integrated high-speed memory, a
substantial change in design that will allow vendors to
put a high-performance chip into a sub-$1,000 machine. Meanwhile,
rival Advanced Micro Devices will release a 350-MHz
version of the K6-2, a chip that increasingly has been
used in inexpensive systems from Compaq Computer, IBM,
and others.
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By Lisa DiCarlo
August 20, 1998
PC Week Online
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Intel Corp. is hoping to push its
low-end Celeron processors into corporate America next
week with new versions that support such
higher-performance features as Level 2 cache. But it may
take more than cache to make it happen. The Santa
Clara, Calif., company on Monday will introduce a new
300MHz Celeron processor, called the 300A, and a 333MHz
Celeron, both of which have 128KB of integrated Level 2
cache. In addition, Intel will unveil a 450MHz Pentium II
for high-end systems.
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By Wylie Wong
August 19, 1998
Computer Reseller News
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National Semiconductor Corp. expects to
suffer losses the next two quarters because of slow
demand for semiconductor products, company officials said
Wednesday. Revenue and earnings per share for
National's first quarter ending August 30 and second
quarter ending Nov. 29 may be worse than its
fourth-quarter loss of $69.3 million, or 42 cents per
share, on revenue of $510 million, National officials
said.
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| August 20, 1998 |
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August 20, 1998
The Register
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In a move which will send shock waves
through the industry, Compaq said yesterday that it
prefers the 64-bit Alpha processor to Merced as it offers
better performance and is 50 per cent cheaper. Richard
George, who runs the Alpha business in the UK, said:
"The Alpha chip is better than the Merced chip. It
has more applications than the IA64."
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August 20, 1998
The Register
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Intel has struck back at Compaq’s
unprecedented attack on the Merced processor by insisting
that the PC vendor is still committed to the platform.
(See story, below). A representative from Intel said:
“Compaq has publicly committed to support Merced
already, so nothing has really changed.”
But a source at Intel who did not wish to be named,
went further than that. He said: “We’re talking
about a product which has still 18 months to go before it
is released and we don’t speculate on its
performance. If we’re not in a position to speculate
about its performance, neither is Compaq.”
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By Kristen Kenedy
August 20, 1998
Computer Retail Week
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Advanced Micro Devices is expected to
announce next week a 350-MHz version of the K6-2 CPU,
which the company said it plans to position as an
alternative to higher-end Pentium II processors. AMD
officials declined to comment about the upcoming
announcement, but acknowledged that the company's road
map calls for a K6-2 350-MHz processor to ship this
quarter. A 400-MHz chip is scheduled for release in the
fourth quarter.
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By Rick Boyd-Merritt with additional reporting by
Margaret Quan
August 19, 1998
EE Times
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Intel Corp.'s latest initiative has
nothing to do with promoting a new technology. Instead,
the microprocessor giant is trying to stomp out an
existing one — the venerable Industry Standard
Architecture bus. Intel has assembled a tiger team that
aims to eliminate ISA from new PCs by the year 2000. Intel
claims the relatively slow and stodgy bus holds back the
PC with its ties to register-level hardware interrupts
and direct-memory access channels, creating
incompatibility issues and support headaches for OEMs.
Analysts said the elimination of the admittedly aging ISA
bus will take longer than Intel would hope and, they
noted, the effort will also aid Intel to drive more PC
functions — such as audio and modem features —
to its processors and chip sets.
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By Larry Barrett
August 20, 1998
Inter@ctive Investor
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National Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE:
NSM), arguably one of the most disappointing technology
stocks of the past five years, added to its woes
Wednesday when it announced that sales and earnings in
the next two quarters will be worse than its fourth
quarter results. In the fourth quarter, National lost
42 cents a share on sales of $510 million.
National shares closed off 1 3/8 to 12 13/16.
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By Reuters
August 19, 1998
Tech Web
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Computer chip maker National
Semiconductor said Wednesday it expected to post losses
and lower sales for its current quarter and the following
quarter. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said
net sales and earnings per share for the two periods will
be lower than the prior quarter -- the fourth quarter of
its fiscal year -- when it posted a loss, excluding
one-time items, of 42 cents a share on sales of $510
million. The current quarter ends Aug. 30.
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| August 19, 1998 |
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By Will Wade
August 17, 1998
Electronic Buyer's News
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National Semiconductor Corp., Sunnyvale,
Calif. has confirmed that its Cyrix division has begun
ramping production of microprocessors at the company's
wafer fab in South Portland, Maine. These parts are the
first Cyrix chips produced in-house since the fabless
microprocessor company was acquired by National last year
in a $530 million deal. Cyrix's 6x86MX processor are
being fabricated with National's 0.25-micron process.
National will continue its foundry relationship with IBM
Corp., said Steve Tobak, vice president of corporate
marketing and communications, but the IBM chips are made
with less aggressive 0.3-micron technology. Tobak said he
expects that half of the company's shipments will come
from the National fab by the end of this year.
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By Jack Robertson
August 14, 1998
Electronic Buyer's News
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Increased chip sales to China and India
this year are offsetting Intel’s sales declines in
the rest of Asia, said Intel president and chief
executive Craig Barrett at a business meeting in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, last week. Asia, once one of the
fastest-growing regions for microprocessor sales, has
become essentially flat, he said. Latin America and
Eastern Europe are surprisingly strong markets, but
Russia is “up and down,” like its economy, the
Intel leader said. |
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By Mark Hachman
August 14, 1998
Electronic Buyer's News
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Intel Corp. will begin offering its OLGA
(Organic Land Grid Array) package used for mobile Pentium
II processors as an option for desktop Pentium II chips,
beginning in the fourth quarter. In addition, Intel will
remove the thermal plate from the back of the new Pentium
II SECC 2 (Single Edge Cartridge Connector) module,
allowing the heat sink to connect directly to the back of
the chip package. Intel typically contracts with
third-party chip-package suppliers, according to a
spokesman for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. |
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By Rick Boyd-Merritt
August 19, 1998
EE Times
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Five long years ago, a Silicon Valley
startup called Chromatic Research Inc. burst on the scene
in a media blitz, trumpeting its plans to build a new
kind of PC component — a media processor —
based on an emerging technique known as VLIW and sold on
a new business model it dubbed the "chipless"
chip company. Partners LG Semicon, Toshiba and
STMicroelectronics would make the Mpact device and
Chromatic would recoup its investment in designing the
part by selling software to run PC graphics, audio, modem
and other functions on it simultaneously. With a handful
of seasoned executives in tow, the operation leapt onto
the charts of hot companies to watch. |
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By Jack Robertson
August 17, 1998
Semiconductor Business News
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SAN JOSE -- SVG Lithography is
developing an advanced step-and-scan lithography system
that will be sold exclusively to Intel
Corp. The new Micrascan-IIIx could give Intel a major
boost into next-generation chips with 0.15-micron feature
sizes.
Intel has become an industry leader in sub-quarter-micron
chip processing, thanks to the powerful help of
lithography tools from
SVGL. Early next year, the microprocessor vendor is
expected to become one of the first chip manufacturers to
achieve large-scale
production at 0.18-micron geometries.
The 0.15-micron tool will be the one that Intel likely
will use to produce critical layers for its
next-generation 64-bit Merced
microprocessor, said Papken der Torossian, chairman of
SVGL's parent, Silicon Valley Group Inc. in San Jose. |
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By Michael Santarini
August 19, 1998
EE Times
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As IBM, Sharp, Motorola and others
prepare to use silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor
technology, EDA vendors have looked at the implications
for design tools and concluded that SOI doesn't pose huge
tool challenges, but will require new models and possibly
new methodologies. Representatives of both Cadence
Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. said the biggest
challenge may be for library vendors, simply because it
takes time to develop libraries. Avant! claims to have
already developed SOI libraries with an unidentified
company, and to have put the libraries through Avant!'s
place-and-route flow.
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| August 18, 1998 |
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August 16, 1998
U-Geek
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Rumors are flying about Intel’s
Merced P7 processor. The processor is set to be
Intel’s entry into 64-bit computing. Initially
slated for 1999 release, Merced has already been delayed
by a full year, until the year 2000. The McKinley
processor is the second iteration of the Merced P7
processor, and the release date is close enough to
Merced’s delayed release date that Intel is
considering forgoing the Merced altogether.
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August 17, 1998
The Register
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Intel is set to change the ground rules
on its architecture once more with the introduction of a
modification to its slot design later on this year. An
Intel representative confirmed today that it would move
to a new slot design dubbed SECC 2. “This is the
mark two version of slot one,” he said. The
design is a cut down version of slot one, he said.
“It’s the current slot one package with the
backing plate taken off so the heat sink can be attached
directly to the processor.”
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By Mark Carroll with additional reporting by Rick
Boyd-Merritt and David Lammers
August 16, 1998
EE Times
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Intel Corp. is ready to detail a path
for Direct Rambus memories to find their way into
workstations and servers. But server makers here and in
the United States are showing some reluctance in just how
fast they want to go down that road, especially for
high-end systems that might need larger memory sizes and
more elaborate error-correction code than Rambus may
cost-effectively deliver. Though Compaq Computer Corp.
plans to use Direct Rambus DRAMs in its Alpha-based
servers, the Houston company's technology road map is
looking for Rambus to deliver a next-generation RDRAM
with higher bandwidth, to become available when
Merced-class servers hit the market in several years. IBM
Corp. hopes to design its own core logic, which will
likely support SDRAMs for use with Merced.
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August 16, 1998
The Register
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Intel has said that delays to the lower
end members of its Pentium II family have arisen because
of a deliberate shift to ramp up its Celeron, low end
products. Sources close to Intel have now said that price
changes slated for August 24th will now be delayed until
14 September. An Intel representative confirmed today
that there was a shortage of PII/266 and PII/300 products
but the reasons for the shortfall varied with the
processors. He said that PII/266MHz parts used a .35
micron process which will not change, but that Intel was
manufacturing a PII/300 using the .25 micron, although he
would not be drawn on a date for when that processor will
arrive.
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By Andy Patrizio
August 14, 1998
TechWeb
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Intel will begin shipping Pentium II
CPUs with a new casing designed to improve signal
transmission and cooling, letting Intel crank up the
speed of the chips well beyond the 500-MHz mark. Intel
will begin using this new housing for the chips in the
fourth quarter of this year on Pentium II chips running
at 350 MHz or higher, according to Manny Vara, a
spokesman for Intel. The 350-MHz, 400-MHz, and even
450-MHz chips don't really need it, he said, but above
500 MHz, this new casing will be important.
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By Michael Kanellos
August 17, 1998
C/Net
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High operating temperatures on Intel's
top chip--its 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon processor for
sophisticated servers--are related to recently reported
performance glitches as well as the delay of the 450-MHz
version of the chip for four-processor servers, according
to sources close to company. The problems occur when four
of the chips are used at once in a server. Solving
temperature problems is crucial in high-end servers
because excess heat can cause data error problems.
Servers containing four processors are some of the most
powerful Intel-based computers on the market today and
typically used to run critical database applications.
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By Michael Kanellos
August 14, 1998
C/Net
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Prices on older Pentium II processors
have inched up in the past two weeks as Intel begins
concentrating production on faster versions of the
Pentium II and on new low-cost Celeron chips. The chips
affected are the older 233-, 266- and 300-MHz Pentium IIs
that are found in the midrange segment of the market,
where systems are typically priced from about $1,000 to
$1,800. Faster 350-, 400-, and 450-MHz chips are now
coming to market in volume to take their place.
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AMD
vs. Intel: Revival of the fittest
Battle for sub-$1,000 chips will
measure resilience, staying power in PC marketplace
By K. OANH HA
August 16, 1998
San Jose Mercury News
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CHIP maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
has made dramatic inroads against Intel Corp. in selling
the microprocessors that power budget PCs -- taking the
lion's share of that market for much of the first half of
this year, and fostering competition that will continue
to provide low prices even as performance rises. San
Jose-based AMD sold more than half of the microprocessors
for computers priced under $1,000 for four of the first
six months of this year -- a gigantic leap from just 4
percent a year ago. Microprocessors serve as the brains
for computers. Intel's miscalculation of the rising
popularity of cheap PCs enabled AMD to reach 51 percent
of the sub-$1,000 market and 34 percent of the general
consumer market in June, the latest date for which
figures were available, said research firm PC Data.
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See Related
Stories AMD
scores copper coup in Motorola technology deal
New
AMD chip breaks from Intel
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Business Week
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For a company whose credo is ''only the
paranoid survive,'' Intel Corp. (INTC) was dangerously
slow to respond to the low-cost personal-computer craze
of the last 18 months. While customers opted for cheaper
models, Intel focused mostly on the pricey high-end chips
that made it one of the world's most profitable
companies. Even its low-cost Celeron chip, unveiled to a
chorus of crummy reviews in April, seemed more of an
afterthought than a serious strategic shift. |
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