Chip makers rip through the 1 GHz barrier

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) upstaged rival Intel at the International Solid

State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, the semiconductor industry's

technology showcase event, by demonstrating a 1.1 GHz Athlon chip, which the

company plans to ship by this summer.

Intel, by comparison, said it has a Pentium III chip in development that will

be available in the fall and run at just over 1000 Megahertz. IBM and Compaq

also showed designs of PowerPC and Alpha processors that will run at 1 GHz or

above. But IBM engineers stole the show with the design of a processor using

transistors operating at up to 4.5 GHz.

Ten years ago, Intel's Andy Grove predicted that microprocessors would reach

speeds of 250 MHz by 2000. The pace at which new chip are entering the market

has increased dramatically in the last three years driven in large part by the

competition from AMD and other which Intel now experiences on almost all

microprocessor fronts. Just last year, the top speed of microprocessors was 500

MHz. That has effectively doubled in just 11 months. Analysts at the ISSCC

predicted that breakneck pace will continue for at least another decade.

Microprocessor speeds will exceed the 10 GHz level by the end of this decade. A

number of recent technological innovations are likely to allow chip makers to

increase processor speeds by making transistors smaller and through innovations

in the way the actual transistors are made and linked to each other in a

circuit.

AMD said the Athlon chip is being produced in the Dresden plant in Germany.

The chip is manufactured with advanced copper interconnect process technology

that AMD has licensed from Motorola. AMD's current top-of-the-line Athlon chip

runs at 800 MHz. "If AMD introduces a 1 GHz processor prior to Intel, that

puts an important stake in the ground. It used to be that Intel made the fastest

chips that ran PCs, and AMD has mounted a formidable challenge here with

Athlon.'' said Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64, a research firm in Saratoga,

California. The 1.1 GHz Athlon chip has an on-chip level-two cache memory, as

opposed to the current architecture, which uses a companion chip, an inherently

slower solution. Meanwhile, Intel said its much anticipated IA-64 Itanium

processor will be introduced with an 800 MHz speed and will be shipped to

customers by the middle of this year. The Itanium will be backward compatible

with 32-bit software programs. The chip has a 4-megabit on-chip level- three

cache memory and as much as 10 times the performance for security decryption.

While not the fastest chip on the market, Intel said more powerful chips are

soon to follow. "800 MHz is just the beginning,'' said Intel vice president

Gadi Singer. Analysts said Intel doesn't need to keep up the processor speed

battle with Intel on the server chip side where other factors are key in giving

Intel a chance to compete with Sun. They point to the highly profitable Xeon

processor line, which the Itanium chip is to sub-plant. Xeon chip run

considerably slower than the fastest Pentium III chips.

The Itanium chip is now being produced and tested, Singer said, adding that

several computer makers are working on systems that can use as many as 512 of

the processors. Meanwhile, IBM engineers showed of transistors that operate at

3.5 to 4.5 GHz. IBM said it has also devised a radical new chip design

architecture that would allow different functional blocks of transistors to run

at different clock speeds. The most compute-intense areas of the microprocessor

would use the highest-speed transistors, while other blocks would use lower

speeds. That in turn would significantly reduce power consumption and thus

increase performance by packing transistors together closer.